1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
12 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
13 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
15 ** Changes in behavior
17 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
18 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
21 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
25 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
26 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
28 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
31 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
32 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
35 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
36 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
37 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
38 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
40 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
41 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
42 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
43 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
45 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
46 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
48 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
49 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
51 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
52 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
53 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
55 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
56 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
57 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
59 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
60 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
61 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
63 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
64 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
65 character at the 4GiB position.
66 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
68 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
69 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
71 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
72 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
74 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
75 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
78 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
81 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
82 replaced before inotify watches were created.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
85 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
86 [bug introduced in the beginning]
88 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
89 when those files are being created or renamed.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
94 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
95 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
96 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
97 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
99 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
100 on stderr approximately every second.
102 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
103 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
105 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
106 other than the default newline character.
108 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
109 a useful setting with high latency links.
111 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
112 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
114 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
115 and output errors in general.
117 ** Changes in behavior
119 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
120 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
121 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
122 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
124 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
125 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
126 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
127 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
128 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
130 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
131 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
133 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
135 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
136 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
138 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
139 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
143 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
144 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
146 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
147 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
149 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
150 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
152 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
153 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
155 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
157 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
158 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
159 documentation are provided.
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
166 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
169 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
170 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
171 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendent.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
174 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
175 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
176 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
179 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
180 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
182 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
183 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
185 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
186 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
187 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
188 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
189 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
190 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
204 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
206 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
207 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
208 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
209 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
210 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
211 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
213 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
214 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
215 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
218 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
219 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
222 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
223 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
224 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
227 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
228 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
229 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
231 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
232 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
233 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
235 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
236 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
237 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
238 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
241 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
242 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
245 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
246 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
248 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
249 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
250 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
252 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
253 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
255 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
256 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
258 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
261 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
262 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
264 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
265 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
268 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
269 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
273 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
274 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
276 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
277 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
278 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
279 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
280 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
281 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
282 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
283 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
284 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
285 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
286 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
287 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
288 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
289 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
290 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
291 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
292 it suitable for embedded system.
294 ** Changes in behavior
296 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
297 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
299 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
300 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
302 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
303 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
304 will result in the delayed output of lines.
306 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
307 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
308 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
312 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
313 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
314 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
316 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
318 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
319 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
320 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
322 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
323 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
324 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
325 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
327 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
328 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
330 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
331 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
332 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
335 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
339 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
340 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
343 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
344 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
345 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
346 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
348 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
349 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
350 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
352 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
353 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
355 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
357 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
358 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
359 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
361 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
362 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
363 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
365 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
366 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
367 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
370 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
371 from the source, when copying across file systems.
372 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
374 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
375 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
376 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
378 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
379 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
381 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
382 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
383 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
384 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
386 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
387 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
388 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
390 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
391 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
392 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
396 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
397 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
398 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
400 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
401 used to identify the split points.
403 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
404 command line argument through to the output.
406 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
409 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
410 a NUL instead of a white space character.
412 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
413 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
415 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
417 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
418 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
419 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
421 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
422 unique groups with empty lines.
424 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
425 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
427 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
430 ** Changes in behavior
432 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
433 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
434 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
435 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
437 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
438 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
440 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
441 not just the transfer counts.
443 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
445 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
446 as per the documented interface.
450 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
452 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
453 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
454 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
455 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
457 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
458 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
459 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
460 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
462 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
463 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
464 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
466 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
467 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
469 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
470 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
472 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
476 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
479 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
483 numfmt: reformat numbers
487 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
488 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
489 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
491 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
492 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
493 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
495 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
496 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminite amount of time.
500 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
503 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
504 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
507 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
508 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
509 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
511 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
512 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
513 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
515 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
516 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
517 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
519 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
520 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
521 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
523 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
526 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
527 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
529 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
530 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
531 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
533 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
534 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
535 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
537 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
538 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
539 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
541 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
542 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
543 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
544 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
546 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
547 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
548 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
550 ** Changes in behavior
552 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
553 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
554 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
555 'total' in the target column.
557 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
558 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
559 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
561 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
562 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
564 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
565 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
569 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
570 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
572 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
573 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
575 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
579 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
580 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
581 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
582 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
583 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
584 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
585 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
586 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
587 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
588 for a patched distribution package.
590 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
591 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
593 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
594 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
595 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
596 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
599 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
603 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
605 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
606 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
607 sha384sum and sha512sum.
611 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
612 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
613 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
614 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
615 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
617 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
618 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
620 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
621 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
622 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
623 eventually exits nonzero.
625 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
626 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
627 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
628 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
631 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
632 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
635 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
636 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
639 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
640 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
641 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
643 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
644 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
645 Before, this would infloop:
646 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
647 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
649 ** Changes in behavior
651 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
655 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
656 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
657 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
658 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
659 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
662 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
663 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
664 format-changing options.
666 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
667 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
668 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
669 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
670 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
674 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
675 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
676 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
677 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
678 are run without following the instructions in README.
680 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
681 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
682 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
683 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
684 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
685 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
686 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
689 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
693 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
694 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
695 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
696 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
698 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
699 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
700 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
703 sort -u could read freed memory.
704 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
705 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
710 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
711 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
712 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
713 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
716 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
720 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
721 processes will not intersperse their output.
722 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
724 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
725 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
726 date: invalid date '\260'
727 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
729 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
730 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
731 lines output by df, can work reliably.
732 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
734 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
735 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
736 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
738 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
739 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
740 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
741 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
742 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
743 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
745 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
748 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
749 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
751 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
752 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
753 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
755 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
756 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
757 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
761 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
763 ** Changes in behavior
765 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
766 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
767 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
768 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
769 have any reason to include it here.
773 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
774 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
775 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
777 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
778 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
779 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
782 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
786 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
787 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
788 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
789 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
790 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
791 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
793 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
794 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
795 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
796 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
797 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
798 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
799 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
801 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
804 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
805 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
809 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
810 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
812 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
814 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
816 ** Changes in behavior
818 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
819 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
820 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
822 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
823 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
826 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
830 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
831 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
832 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
833 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
834 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
835 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
836 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
837 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
839 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
840 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
841 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
842 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
843 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
845 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
846 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
848 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
849 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
851 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
852 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
854 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
855 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
857 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
858 additional static suffix to output file names.
860 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
861 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
862 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
864 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
865 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
869 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
870 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
871 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
873 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
874 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
875 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
876 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
877 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
878 typically still point to one of the hard links.
880 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
881 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
882 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
883 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
884 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
886 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
887 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
888 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
889 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
893 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
894 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
895 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
897 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
898 instead of causing a usage failure.
900 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
903 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
907 realpath: print resolved file names.
911 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
914 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
917 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
918 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
919 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
920 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
921 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
924 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
925 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
926 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
928 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
929 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
932 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
933 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
934 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
935 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
938 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
940 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
943 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
944 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
945 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
947 ** Changes in behavior
949 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
950 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
951 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
952 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
953 usually-short referent instead.
955 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
956 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
957 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
958 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
961 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
965 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
966 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
967 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
969 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
970 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
972 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
973 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
977 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
978 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
980 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
981 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
982 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
983 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
985 ** Changes in behavior
987 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
988 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
989 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
993 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
994 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
995 only .tar.xz files is enough.
998 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1002 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1003 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1004 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1006 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1007 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1009 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1010 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1011 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1012 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1013 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1015 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1016 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1017 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1018 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1019 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1020 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1021 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1022 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1024 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1025 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1027 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1028 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1030 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1033 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1034 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1035 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1037 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1038 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1039 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1040 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1042 ** Changes in behavior
1044 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1045 when -v or -c specified.
1047 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1048 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1052 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1053 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1054 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1055 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1056 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1058 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1059 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1060 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1062 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1063 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1064 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1065 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1066 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1067 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1068 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1070 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1071 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1072 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1076 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1077 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1079 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1082 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1083 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1085 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1086 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1088 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1089 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1091 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1093 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1097 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1098 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1100 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1107 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1108 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1110 ** Changes in behavior
1112 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1113 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1114 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1115 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1116 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1117 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1118 resolved for 2.6.39.
1119 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1120 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1121 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1125 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1132 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1133 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1136 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1137 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1140 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1141 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1142 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1144 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1147 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1150 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1153 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1158 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1159 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1160 processed portion thereof.
1162 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1163 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1165 ** Changes in behavior
1167 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1168 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1169 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1171 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1172 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1173 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1175 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1176 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1178 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1179 Use --preserve-context instead.
1181 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1188 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1189 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1190 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1191 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1194 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1195 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1197 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1198 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1199 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1201 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1202 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1204 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1205 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1209 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1210 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1211 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1212 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1213 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1214 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1215 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1216 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1218 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1219 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1220 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1222 ** Changes in behavior
1224 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1225 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1226 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1233 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1234 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1238 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1242 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1243 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1245 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1246 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1248 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1249 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1251 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1252 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1253 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1254 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1256 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1257 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1259 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1260 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1261 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1263 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1265 ** Changes in behavior
1267 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1268 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1269 to the number of available processors.
1273 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1276 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1280 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1281 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1282 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1283 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1285 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1286 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1287 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1289 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1290 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1292 ** Changes in behavior
1294 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1295 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1297 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1298 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1299 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1300 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1301 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1302 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1304 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1305 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1306 the same way as the others.
1308 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1309 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1312 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1316 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1317 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1318 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1320 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1321 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1323 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1324 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1325 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1327 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1328 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1330 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1331 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1333 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1334 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1335 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1337 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1338 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1339 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1340 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1344 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1345 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1347 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1350 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1351 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1353 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1355 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1356 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1357 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1359 ** Changes in behavior
1361 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1362 rather than its aliased target.
1364 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1365 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1366 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1368 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1369 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1370 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1371 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1372 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1373 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1374 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1375 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1377 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1379 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1381 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1382 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1385 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1386 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1387 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1388 control like taskset for example.
1390 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1392 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1393 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1394 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1395 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1396 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1397 includes %C when context information is available.
1399 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1400 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1401 rather than a file system attribute.
1403 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1404 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1405 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1406 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1408 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1409 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1410 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1412 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1413 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1414 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1417 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1421 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1424 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1426 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1427 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1429 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1430 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1431 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1432 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1434 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1435 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1440 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1441 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1443 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1444 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1445 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1447 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1448 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1449 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1450 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1451 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1452 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1453 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1454 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1455 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1457 ** Changes in behavior
1459 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1460 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1462 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1463 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1470 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1471 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1472 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1477 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1478 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1480 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1481 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1482 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1483 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1485 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1486 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1487 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1490 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1494 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1495 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1498 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1499 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1500 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1502 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1503 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1505 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1506 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1507 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1508 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1510 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1511 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1512 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1514 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1515 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1516 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1519 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1520 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1521 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1523 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1524 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1525 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1526 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1528 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1529 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1530 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1532 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1533 processes will not intersperse their output.
1534 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1537 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1541 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1542 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1544 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1545 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1547 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1548 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1549 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1550 the presence of the empty string argument.
1551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1553 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1554 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1555 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1556 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1558 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1559 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1561 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1562 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1563 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1565 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1566 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1567 and with a malicious user on the same system
1568 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1569 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1576 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1577 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1578 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1580 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1581 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1582 offending directory and all "contents."
1584 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1585 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1586 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1588 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1589 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1590 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1592 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1593 processes will not intersperse their output.
1594 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1595 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1597 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1598 output the name of the file to stdout.
1599 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1601 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1602 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1603 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1605 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1606 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1609 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1610 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1611 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1613 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1614 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1615 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1616 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1617 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1618 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1620 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1621 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1622 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1623 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1625 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1626 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1628 ** Changes in behavior
1630 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1631 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1632 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1633 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1634 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1636 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1637 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1638 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1639 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1641 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1643 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1644 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1645 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1646 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1647 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1651 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1655 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1656 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1658 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1659 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1661 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1662 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1663 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1665 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1666 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1673 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1674 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1675 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1677 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1678 to accommodate leap seconds.
1679 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1681 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1682 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1683 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1685 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1687 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1688 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1689 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1691 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1692 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1693 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1694 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1695 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1699 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1700 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1701 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1702 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1704 ** Changes in behavior
1706 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1707 environment variable is set.
1709 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1710 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1711 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1715 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1716 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1717 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1718 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1720 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1721 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1722 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1723 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1727 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1728 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1729 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1731 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1732 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1733 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1734 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1735 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1736 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1737 another improvement:
1739 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1740 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1743 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1747 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1748 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1749 and libraries tested at configure time.
1750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1752 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1753 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1755 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1756 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1758 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1759 printing a summary to stderr.
1760 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1762 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1763 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1764 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1766 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1767 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1769 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1770 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1771 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1772 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1774 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1775 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1776 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1777 which is relatively unusual.
1778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1780 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1781 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1782 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1783 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1784 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1785 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1786 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1790 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1791 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1792 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1793 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1794 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1798 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1799 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1801 ** Changes in behavior
1803 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1804 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1805 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1806 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1807 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1810 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1814 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1815 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1817 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1818 before data copying has started.
1820 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1821 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1823 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1824 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1825 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1826 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1828 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1829 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1830 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1831 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1833 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1838 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1839 for its standard streams.
1841 ** Changes in behavior
1843 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1844 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1845 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1846 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1847 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1848 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1850 ** Deprecated options
1852 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1853 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1857 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1859 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1860 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1861 a btrfs file system.
1863 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1865 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1866 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1868 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1869 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1872 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1876 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1877 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1878 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1879 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1881 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1882 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1883 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1884 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1885 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1890 make check: two tests have been corrected
1894 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1895 inherited from gnulib.
1898 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1902 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1903 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1904 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1905 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1907 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1908 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1910 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1912 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1913 systems without xattr support.
1915 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1916 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1917 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1919 ** Changes in behavior
1921 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1922 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1923 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1924 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1926 ** Improved robustness
1928 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1929 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1930 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1931 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1932 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1933 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1934 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1935 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1936 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1940 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1941 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1943 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1944 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1945 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1946 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1947 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1950 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1954 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1955 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1956 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1960 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1961 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1962 data was read, or on process exit.
1963 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1965 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1966 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1967 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1968 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1970 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1971 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1972 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1973 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1975 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1976 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1978 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1979 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1981 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1982 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1983 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1985 ** Changes in behavior
1987 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1988 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1989 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1991 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1992 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1994 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1995 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1996 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1999 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2003 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2005 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2006 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2007 install: Never copies xattrs
2009 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2010 from overwriting any existing destination file
2012 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2013 mode where this feature is available.
2015 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2016 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2017 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2018 do not modify the destination at all.
2020 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2022 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2026 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2027 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2029 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2031 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2032 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2034 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2035 processing the first file name
2037 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2038 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2039 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2040 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2042 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2043 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2045 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2046 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2049 ** Changes in behavior
2051 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2052 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2054 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2055 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2056 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2058 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2059 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2061 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2063 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2064 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2065 is still marked with a '+'.
2068 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2072 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2073 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2077 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2078 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2079 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2080 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2081 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2082 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2084 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2085 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2087 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2088 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2090 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2092 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2093 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2094 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2096 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2097 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2099 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2100 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2101 used to factor large numbers.
2103 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2106 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2108 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2110 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2111 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2113 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2114 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2115 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2116 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2118 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2119 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2120 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2122 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2123 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2127 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2129 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2130 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2132 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2133 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2135 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2137 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2138 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2142 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2143 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2144 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2146 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2148 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2149 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2150 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2152 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2153 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2154 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2156 ** Changes in behavior
2158 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2159 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2166 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2167 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2168 'futimens' system calls.
2172 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2174 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2175 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2176 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2178 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2179 with no USERNAME argument.
2181 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2182 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2183 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2185 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2186 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2187 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2188 number of fields for some inputs.
2190 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2191 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2193 ** Changes in behavior
2195 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2196 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2199 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2203 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2205 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2206 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2207 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2208 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2210 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2211 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2213 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2214 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2216 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2217 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2219 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2220 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2221 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2222 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2224 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2225 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2226 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2227 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2228 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2229 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2231 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2232 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2234 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2235 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2236 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2238 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2239 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2241 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2242 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2244 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2245 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2246 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2247 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2249 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2250 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2252 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2253 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2255 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2256 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2257 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2261 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2262 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2264 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2265 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2266 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2267 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2271 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2272 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2274 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2276 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2280 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2281 which have negative errno values.
2285 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2289 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2293 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2294 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2297 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2301 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2302 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2303 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2305 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2306 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2307 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2308 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2312 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2313 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2314 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2315 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2318 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2322 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2324 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2325 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2326 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2329 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2333 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2334 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2336 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2338 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2340 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2342 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2346 ** Changes in behavior
2348 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2349 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2351 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2352 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2354 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2355 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2356 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2360 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2361 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2362 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2363 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2364 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2365 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2366 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2367 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2368 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2369 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2370 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2372 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2373 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2374 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2377 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2380 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2381 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2382 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2384 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2385 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2386 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2389 ** New build options
2391 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2392 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2393 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2394 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2396 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2397 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2398 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2399 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2400 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2401 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2402 of "make check" fail.
2404 ** Remove deprecated options
2406 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2407 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2408 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2409 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2410 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2412 ** Improved robustness
2414 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2415 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2416 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2417 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2418 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2419 loss of the contents of a/f.
2421 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2422 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2426 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2427 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2428 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2430 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2431 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2432 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2433 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2435 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2436 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2437 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2438 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2439 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2440 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2441 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2442 destination is a symlink.
2444 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2446 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2447 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2449 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2450 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2452 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2454 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2455 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2457 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2458 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2460 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2463 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2464 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2466 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2467 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2469 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2470 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2471 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2472 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2474 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2475 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2476 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2478 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2479 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2480 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2482 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2483 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2484 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2485 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2487 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2488 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2489 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2491 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2492 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2494 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2495 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2497 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2499 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2500 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2501 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2503 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2504 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2506 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2507 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2509 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2510 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2512 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2513 [present in the original version]
2516 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2520 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2522 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2523 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2524 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2526 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2527 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2529 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2533 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2534 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2536 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2537 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2539 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2540 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2542 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2543 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2544 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2545 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2546 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2547 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2549 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2550 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2553 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2554 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2556 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2559 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2560 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2561 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2563 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2564 directory is unreadable.
2566 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2567 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2568 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2570 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2571 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2572 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2573 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2574 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2577 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2578 Before it would print nothing.
2580 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2582 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2583 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2584 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2585 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2586 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2587 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2588 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2589 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2591 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2595 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2596 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2597 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2599 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2600 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2601 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2602 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2605 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2609 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2610 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2611 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2612 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2613 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2614 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2615 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2617 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2618 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2619 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2620 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2621 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2622 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2623 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2624 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2626 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2627 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2628 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2631 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2635 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2636 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2638 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2639 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2640 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2642 ** Improved robustness
2644 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2645 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2646 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2649 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2653 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2654 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2655 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2656 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2657 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2659 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2663 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2666 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2670 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2671 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2672 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2673 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2675 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2676 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2678 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2679 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2680 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2683 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2685 ** Improved robustness
2687 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2688 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2690 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2691 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2692 or NFS-mounted partition.
2694 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2695 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2699 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2700 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2701 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2702 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2703 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2704 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2706 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2707 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2709 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2710 or neglect to report file removal.
2712 For the "groups" command:
2714 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2715 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2717 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2719 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2721 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2725 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2726 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2729 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2731 ** Changes in behavior
2733 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2734 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2735 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2736 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2738 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2739 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2740 a final './' or '../' component.
2742 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2743 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2744 this only for pipes.
2746 ** Infrastructure changes
2748 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2749 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2750 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2751 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2755 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2756 name is "." or "..".
2758 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2759 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2760 dirent.d_type support.
2762 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2763 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2765 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2766 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2767 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2768 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2771 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2773 ** Changes in behavior
2775 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2779 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2780 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2784 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2785 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2786 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2788 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2789 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2791 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2792 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2794 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2796 ** Improved robustness
2798 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2799 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2800 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2802 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2803 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2806 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2807 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2809 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2810 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2812 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2813 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2815 ** Changes in behavior
2817 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2818 where the two are distinct.
2820 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2821 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2822 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2823 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2824 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2825 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2826 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2827 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2828 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2829 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2830 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2831 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2832 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2833 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2834 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2835 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2836 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2838 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2839 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2840 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2842 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2843 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2844 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2845 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2848 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2849 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2853 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2854 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2855 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2856 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2858 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2859 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2860 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2862 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2863 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2864 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2865 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2866 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2869 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2870 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2872 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2873 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2874 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2875 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2877 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2878 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2879 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2881 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2882 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2883 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2884 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2886 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2887 and sticky) with the -m option.
2889 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2890 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2891 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2892 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2893 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2895 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2896 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2898 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2902 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2903 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2904 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2905 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2907 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2909 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2911 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2912 silently ignoring one of them.
2914 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2915 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2916 containing this change was 5.92.
2918 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2919 automatically newline terminated.
2921 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2922 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2923 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2924 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2927 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2928 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2929 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2932 ** Scheduled for removal
2934 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2935 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2937 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2938 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2939 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2940 command to unlink a directory.
2942 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2943 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2944 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2945 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2949 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2950 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2951 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2952 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2953 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2954 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2958 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2959 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2961 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2963 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2964 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2965 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2967 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2968 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2971 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2972 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2974 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2975 list directories before files.
2977 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2978 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2979 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2980 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2983 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2985 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2987 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2988 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2989 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2991 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2992 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2996 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2997 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2998 usually printing nothing.
3000 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3002 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3003 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3004 them with hard-linked directories.
3006 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3007 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3008 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3010 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3011 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3012 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3014 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3017 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3018 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3020 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3021 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3023 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3024 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3026 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3027 all command-line arguments.
3029 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3031 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3033 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3034 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3036 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3038 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3039 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3040 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3041 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3042 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3044 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3045 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3047 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3048 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3049 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3050 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3052 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3054 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3058 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3059 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3061 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3062 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3064 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3065 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3067 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3068 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3070 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3071 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3073 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3075 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3076 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3077 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3080 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3082 ** Build-related bug fixes
3084 installing .mo files would fail
3087 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3091 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3093 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3096 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3100 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3101 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3105 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3107 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3108 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3110 ** Deprecated options
3112 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3113 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3115 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3119 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3121 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3122 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3123 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3124 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3126 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3129 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3135 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3140 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3142 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3144 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3145 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3146 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3148 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3149 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3150 problematic usages. These include:
3152 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3153 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3154 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3155 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3156 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3157 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3158 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3159 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3160 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3162 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3163 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3165 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3166 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3167 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3168 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3170 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3171 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3172 between binary and text files.
3174 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3178 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3182 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3183 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3185 head tac tail tee tr
3186 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3188 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3189 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3191 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3192 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3193 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3195 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3197 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3199 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3200 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3201 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3205 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3207 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3208 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3210 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3211 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3212 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3216 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3217 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3221 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3222 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3223 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3227 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3228 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3232 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3234 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3236 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3240 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3241 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3242 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3244 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3245 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3246 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3247 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3248 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3250 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3254 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3255 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3256 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3258 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3260 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3261 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3262 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3263 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3265 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3267 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3268 rather than silently wrapping around.
3270 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3271 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3273 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3274 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3276 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3277 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3278 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3279 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3281 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3283 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3285 ** Improved robustness
3287 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3288 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3289 no matter how large the result.
3291 ** Improved portability
3293 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3294 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3296 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3298 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3299 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3300 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3302 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3303 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3307 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3308 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3310 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3312 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3313 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3314 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3315 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3317 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3318 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3320 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3321 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3322 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3324 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3326 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3327 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3329 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3330 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3332 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3334 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3335 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3337 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3338 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3340 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3341 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3342 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3344 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3346 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3348 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3352 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3354 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3355 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3356 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3358 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3359 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3361 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3362 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3363 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3365 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3366 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3368 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3369 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3370 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3371 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3373 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3374 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3376 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3377 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3378 the file system does not support it.
3380 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3382 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3383 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3385 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3387 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3388 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3390 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3391 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3392 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3393 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3395 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3396 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3399 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3400 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3401 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3402 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3404 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3405 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3406 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3407 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3409 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3410 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3412 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3414 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3415 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3416 reporting incorrect results.
3420 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3421 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3423 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3426 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3428 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3429 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3431 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3432 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3434 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3437 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3438 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3439 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3440 the file name does not look like a page range.
3442 printf has several changes:
3444 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3445 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3447 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3448 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3449 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3451 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3452 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3455 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3456 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3458 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3459 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3461 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3463 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3464 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3466 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3468 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3470 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3471 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3472 when first encountering the directory.
3476 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3477 output; POSIX requires this.
3479 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3480 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3482 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3484 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3485 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3487 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3488 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3490 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3491 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3492 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3493 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3494 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3495 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3496 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3498 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3499 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3500 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3502 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3503 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3505 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3507 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3509 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3510 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3511 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3512 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3514 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3518 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3519 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3520 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3521 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3522 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3524 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3525 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3526 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3528 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3529 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3531 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3532 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3534 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3535 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3536 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3537 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3538 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3540 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3541 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3543 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3544 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3546 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3548 nocreat do not create the output file
3549 excl fail if the output file already exists
3550 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3551 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3553 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3555 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3556 direct use direct I/O for data
3557 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3558 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3559 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3560 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3561 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3563 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3565 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3566 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3569 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3570 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3571 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3572 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3573 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3574 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3576 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3577 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3579 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3582 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3584 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3586 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3587 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3589 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3590 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3591 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3593 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3594 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3595 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3597 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3599 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3600 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3602 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3603 for compatibility with bash.
3605 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3607 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3608 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3609 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3610 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3612 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3613 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3615 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3616 ls supports TABSIZE.
3617 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3618 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3619 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3621 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3624 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3626 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3627 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3628 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3629 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3630 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3631 an offset, not as a file name.
3633 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3634 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3636 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3637 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3639 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3640 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3642 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3643 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3644 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3646 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3647 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3649 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3650 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3654 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3656 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3658 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3662 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3663 or more arguments between partitions.
3665 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3666 holes in the destination.
3668 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3669 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3670 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3671 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3672 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3673 terminates immediately.
3675 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3677 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3679 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3680 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3681 not the empty string.
3683 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3684 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3688 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3689 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3690 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3693 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3700 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3704 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3705 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3707 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3708 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3710 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3711 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3712 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3715 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3719 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3720 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3722 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3723 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3725 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3726 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3727 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3729 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3731 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3734 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3736 ** Configuration option
3738 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3739 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3743 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3744 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3748 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3749 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3750 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3753 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3754 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3755 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3756 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3757 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3758 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3759 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3762 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3766 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3767 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3768 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3770 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3771 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3773 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3775 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3776 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3777 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3778 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3780 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3782 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3783 not just the ones that reference directories
3785 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3786 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3788 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3789 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3790 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3792 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3793 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3794 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3795 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3796 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3797 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3799 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3804 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3805 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3807 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3809 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3811 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3813 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3814 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3816 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3817 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3819 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3821 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3825 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3827 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3829 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3830 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3831 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3832 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3833 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3835 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3836 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3838 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3839 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3841 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3842 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3844 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3845 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3846 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3850 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3851 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3852 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3853 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3854 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3855 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3856 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3857 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3858 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3859 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3860 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3861 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3862 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3863 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3865 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3867 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3868 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3870 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3872 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3874 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3875 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3877 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3879 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3880 without a trailing newline.
3882 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3883 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3885 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3888 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3892 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3894 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3896 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3897 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3898 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3899 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3901 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3903 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3904 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3905 be printed without leading spaces.
3907 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3908 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3913 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3914 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3915 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3917 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3919 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3920 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3922 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3923 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3925 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3926 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3928 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3930 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3932 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3934 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3935 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3937 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3939 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3941 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3942 byte offsets are specified.
3945 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3948 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3951 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3952 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3953 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3954 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3955 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3956 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3957 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3958 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3959 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3960 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3961 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3962 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3963 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3964 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3965 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3966 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3967 directory where M has write access.
3968 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3969 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3970 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3973 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3974 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3975 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3976 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3977 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3978 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3979 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3980 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3981 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3982 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3983 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3984 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3985 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3986 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3987 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3988 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3989 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3990 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3991 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3992 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3993 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3994 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3995 appeared one additional time.
3997 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3998 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3999 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4000 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4003 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4004 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4005 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4006 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4007 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4008 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4009 if there were more than 338.
4011 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4012 - false --help now exits nonzero
4015 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4016 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4017 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4018 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4021 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4022 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4023 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4024 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4025 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4028 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4029 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4030 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4031 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4032 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4033 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4034 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4037 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4038 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4039 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4040 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4041 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4042 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4044 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4045 under certain unusual conditions
4046 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4047 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4050 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4051 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4052 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4053 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4054 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4055 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4056 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4057 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4058 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4059 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4060 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4061 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4062 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4063 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4064 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4065 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4068 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4069 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4072 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4073 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4074 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4075 involving hard-linked directories
4076 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4077 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4078 character-special and block files
4081 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4082 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4083 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4084 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4085 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4086 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4087 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4088 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4089 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4091 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4092 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4093 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4094 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4095 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4096 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4097 specified on the command line.
4098 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4099 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4100 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4101 the first file untouched.
4102 * readlink: new program
4103 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4104 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4105 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4106 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4107 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4108 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4111 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4112 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4113 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4114 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4115 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4116 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4117 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4118 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4119 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4120 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4121 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4122 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4124 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4125 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4126 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4128 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4129 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4130 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4131 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4132 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4133 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4134 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4135 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4138 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4139 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4142 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4143 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4144 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4145 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4146 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4147 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4148 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4151 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4152 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4154 ========================================================================
4155 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4156 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4159 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4161 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4162 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4163 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4164 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4165 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4166 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4167 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4168 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4169 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4170 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4171 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4172 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4174 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4175 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4176 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4177 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4179 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4182 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4184 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4185 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4186 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4187 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4188 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4189 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4190 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4193 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4194 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4195 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4196 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4197 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4198 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4199 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4200 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4201 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4202 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4203 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4204 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4205 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4206 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4207 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4208 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4210 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4211 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4213 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4214 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4215 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4216 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4217 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4218 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4220 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4221 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4222 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4223 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4224 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4225 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4226 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4228 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4229 the source files in the following example:
4230 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4231 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4232 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4233 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4234 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4235 links between source files with --preserve=links
4236 * cp accepts new options:
4237 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4238 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4239 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4240 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4241 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4242 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4243 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4244 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4245 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4247 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4248 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4249 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4250 even though it's older than dest.
4251 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4252 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4253 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4254 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4255 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4257 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4258 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4259 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4260 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4261 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4262 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4263 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4265 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4266 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4267 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4269 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4270 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4271 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4272 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4273 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4274 This is the default.
4276 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4277 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4278 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4279 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4280 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4282 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4285 ========================================================================
4286 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4287 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4290 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4291 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4293 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4294 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4295 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4296 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4297 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4299 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4300 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4301 that specifies a non-directory
4304 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4305 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4306 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4307 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4308 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4309 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4310 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4311 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4312 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4313 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4314 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4315 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4316 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4317 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4318 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4319 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4320 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4321 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4322 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4323 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4324 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4325 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4326 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4327 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4329 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4330 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4331 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4333 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4335 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4336 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4338 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4339 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4340 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4341 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4342 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4344 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4345 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4346 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4347 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4348 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4350 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4352 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4353 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4354 * still more portability fixes
4355 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4356 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4358 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4360 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4362 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4364 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4365 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4366 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4367 there is any time remaining
4368 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4370 ========================================================================
4371 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4372 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4374 This package began as the union of the following:
4375 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4377 ========================================================================
4379 Copyright (C) 2001-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4381 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4382 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4383 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4384 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4385 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4386 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.