1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
21 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
22 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
25 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
26 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
27 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
29 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
30 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
32 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
36 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
37 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
39 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
40 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
41 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
43 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
44 unique groups with empty lines.
46 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
47 used to identify the split points.
49 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
50 of input items in the permuted output.
52 ** Changes in behavior
54 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
55 not just the transfer counts.
57 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
58 as per the documented interface.
62 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
63 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
64 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
65 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
67 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
68 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
69 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
71 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
72 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
76 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
79 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
83 numfmt: reformat numbers
87 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
88 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
89 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
91 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
92 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
93 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
97 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
100 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
101 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
104 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
105 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
108 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
109 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
110 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
112 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
113 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
114 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
116 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
117 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
118 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
120 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
123 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
124 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
126 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
127 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
128 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
130 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
131 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
132 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
134 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
135 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
136 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
138 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
139 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
140 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
141 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
143 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
144 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
145 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
147 ** Changes in behavior
149 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
150 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
151 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
152 'total' in the target column.
154 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
155 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
156 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
158 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
159 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
163 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
164 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
166 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
167 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
169 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
173 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
174 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
175 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
176 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
177 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
178 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
179 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
180 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
181 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
182 for a patched distribution package.
184 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
185 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
187 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
188 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
189 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
190 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
193 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
197 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
199 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
200 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
201 sha384sum and sha512sum.
205 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
206 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
207 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
208 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
211 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
212 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
214 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
215 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
216 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
217 eventually exits nonzero.
219 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
220 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
221 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
222 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
225 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
226 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
229 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
230 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
231 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
233 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
234 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
237 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
238 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
239 Before, this would infloop:
240 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
241 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
243 ** Changes in behavior
245 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
249 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
250 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
251 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
252 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
253 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
256 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
257 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
258 format-changing options.
260 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
261 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
262 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
263 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
264 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
268 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
269 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
270 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
271 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
272 are run without following the instructions in README.
274 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
275 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
276 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
277 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
278 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
279 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
280 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
283 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
287 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
288 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
289 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
290 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
292 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
293 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
294 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
297 sort -u could read freed memory.
298 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
299 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
304 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
305 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
306 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
307 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
310 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
314 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
315 processes will not intersperse their output.
316 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
318 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
319 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
320 date: invalid date '\260'
321 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
323 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
324 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
325 lines output by df, can work reliably.
326 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
328 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
329 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
330 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
332 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
333 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
334 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
335 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
336 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
337 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
339 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
342 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
343 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
345 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
346 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
347 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
349 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
350 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
351 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
355 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
357 ** Changes in behavior
359 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
360 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
361 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
362 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
363 have any reason to include it here.
367 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
368 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
369 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
371 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
372 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
373 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
376 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
380 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
381 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
382 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
383 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
384 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
385 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
387 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
388 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
389 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
390 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
391 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
392 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
393 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
395 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
398 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
399 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
403 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
404 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
406 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
408 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
410 ** Changes in behavior
412 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
413 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
414 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
416 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
417 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
420 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
424 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
425 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
426 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
427 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
428 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
429 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
430 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
431 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
433 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
434 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
435 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
436 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
437 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
439 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
440 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
442 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
443 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
445 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
446 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
448 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
449 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
451 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
452 additional static suffix to output file names.
454 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
455 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
456 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
458 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
459 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
463 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
464 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
467 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
468 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
469 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
470 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
471 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
472 typically still point to one of the hard links.
474 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
475 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
476 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
477 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
478 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
480 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
481 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
482 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
483 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
487 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
488 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
489 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
491 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
492 instead of causing a usage failure.
494 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
497 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
501 realpath: print resolved file names.
505 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
508 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
511 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
512 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
513 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
514 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
515 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
518 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
519 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
520 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
522 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
523 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
526 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
527 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
528 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
529 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
530 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
532 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
534 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
537 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
538 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
539 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
541 ** Changes in behavior
543 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
544 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
545 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
546 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
547 usually-short referent instead.
549 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
550 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
551 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
552 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
555 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
559 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
560 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
561 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
563 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
566 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
571 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
572 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
574 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
575 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
576 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
577 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
579 ** Changes in behavior
581 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
582 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
583 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
587 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
588 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
589 only .tar.xz files is enough.
592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
596 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
597 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
598 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
600 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
601 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
603 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
604 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
605 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
606 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
607 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
609 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
610 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
611 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
612 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
613 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
614 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
615 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
616 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
618 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
619 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
621 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
622 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
624 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
627 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
628 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
629 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
631 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
632 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
633 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
636 ** Changes in behavior
638 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
639 when -v or -c specified.
641 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
642 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
646 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
647 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
648 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
649 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
650 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
652 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
653 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
654 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
656 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
657 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
658 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
659 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
660 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
661 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
662 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
664 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
665 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
666 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
670 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
671 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
673 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
676 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
677 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
679 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
680 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
682 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
683 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
685 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
687 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
691 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
692 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
694 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
697 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
701 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
702 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
704 ** Changes in behavior
706 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
707 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
708 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
709 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
710 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
711 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
713 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
714 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
715 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
719 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
722 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
726 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
727 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
730 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
731 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
732 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
734 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
735 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
736 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
738 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
741 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
744 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
745 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
747 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
752 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
753 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
754 processed portion thereof.
756 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
757 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
759 ** Changes in behavior
761 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
762 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
763 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
765 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
766 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
767 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
769 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
770 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
772 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
773 Use --preserve-context instead.
775 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
778 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
782 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
783 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
784 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
785 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
786 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
788 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
789 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
791 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
792 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
793 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
795 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
796 reject file names invalid for that file system.
798 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
803 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
804 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
805 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
806 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
807 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
808 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
809 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
810 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
812 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
813 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
814 the same number of fields are output for each line.
816 ** Changes in behavior
818 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
819 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
820 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
823 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
827 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
828 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
829 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
832 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
836 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
837 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
839 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
840 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
842 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
843 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
845 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
846 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
847 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
848 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
850 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
851 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
853 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
854 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
855 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
857 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
859 ** Changes in behavior
861 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
862 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
863 to the number of available processors.
867 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
870 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
874 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
875 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
876 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
877 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
879 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
880 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
881 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
883 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
884 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
886 ** Changes in behavior
888 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
889 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
891 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
892 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
893 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
894 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
895 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
896 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
898 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
899 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
900 the same way as the others.
902 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
903 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
906 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
910 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
911 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
912 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
914 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
915 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
917 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
918 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
919 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
921 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
924 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
925 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
927 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
928 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
929 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
931 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
932 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
933 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
934 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
938 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
939 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
941 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
944 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
945 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
947 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
949 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
950 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
951 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
953 ** Changes in behavior
955 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
956 rather than its aliased target.
958 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
959 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
960 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
962 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
963 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
964 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
965 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
966 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
967 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
968 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
969 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
971 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
973 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
975 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
976 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
979 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
980 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
981 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
982 control like taskset for example.
984 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
986 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
987 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
988 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
989 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
990 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
991 includes %C when context information is available.
993 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
994 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
995 rather than a file system attribute.
997 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
998 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
999 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1000 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1002 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1003 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1004 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1006 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1007 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1008 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1011 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1015 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1018 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1020 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1021 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1023 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1024 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1025 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1026 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1028 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1029 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1030 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1034 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1035 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1037 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1038 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1039 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1041 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1042 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1043 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1044 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1045 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1046 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1047 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1048 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1049 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1051 ** Changes in behavior
1053 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1054 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1056 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1057 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1060 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1064 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1065 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1066 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1067 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1071 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1072 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1074 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1075 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1076 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1077 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1079 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1080 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1081 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1084 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1088 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1089 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1092 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1093 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1094 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1096 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1097 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1099 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1100 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1101 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1104 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1105 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1108 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1109 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1110 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1113 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1114 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1115 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1117 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1118 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1119 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1122 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1123 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1126 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1127 processes will not intersperse their output.
1128 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1131 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1135 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1138 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1141 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1142 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1143 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1144 the presence of the empty string argument.
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1147 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1148 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1149 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1150 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1152 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1153 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1155 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1156 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1157 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1159 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1160 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1161 and with a malicious user on the same system
1162 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1166 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1170 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1171 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1174 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1175 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1176 offending directory and all "contents."
1178 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1179 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1180 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1182 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1183 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1184 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1186 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1187 processes will not intersperse their output.
1188 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1189 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1191 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1192 output the name of the file to stdout.
1193 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1195 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1196 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1197 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1199 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1200 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1203 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1204 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1205 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1207 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1208 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1209 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1210 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1211 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1212 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1214 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1215 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1216 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1217 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1219 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1220 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1222 ** Changes in behavior
1224 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1225 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1226 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1227 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1228 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1230 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1231 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1232 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1233 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1235 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1237 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1238 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1239 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1240 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1241 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1245 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1249 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1250 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1252 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1253 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1255 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1256 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1257 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1259 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1260 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1267 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1268 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1271 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1272 to accommodate leap seconds.
1273 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1275 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1276 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1277 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1279 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1281 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1282 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1283 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1285 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1286 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1287 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1288 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1289 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1293 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1294 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1295 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1296 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1298 ** Changes in behavior
1300 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1301 environment variable is set.
1303 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1304 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1305 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1309 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1310 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1311 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1312 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1314 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1315 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1316 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1317 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1321 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1322 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1323 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1325 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1326 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1327 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1328 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1329 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1330 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1331 another improvement:
1333 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1334 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1337 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1341 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1342 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1343 and libraries tested at configure time.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1346 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1349 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1350 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1352 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1353 printing a summary to stderr.
1354 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1356 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1357 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1358 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1360 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1363 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1364 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1365 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1366 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1368 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1369 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1370 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1371 which is relatively unusual.
1372 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1374 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1375 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1376 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1377 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1378 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1379 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1380 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1384 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1385 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1386 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1387 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1388 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1392 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1393 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1395 ** Changes in behavior
1397 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1398 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1399 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1400 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1401 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1404 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1408 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1409 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1411 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1412 before data copying has started.
1414 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1415 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1417 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1418 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1419 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1420 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1422 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1423 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1424 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1425 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1427 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1432 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1433 for its standard streams.
1435 ** Changes in behavior
1437 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1438 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1439 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1440 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1441 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1442 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1444 ** Deprecated options
1446 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1447 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1451 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1453 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1454 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1455 a btrfs file system.
1457 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1459 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1460 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1462 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1463 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1466 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1470 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1471 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1472 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1473 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1475 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1476 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1477 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1478 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1479 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1484 make check: two tests have been corrected
1488 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1489 inherited from gnulib.
1492 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1496 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1497 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1498 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1499 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1501 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1502 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1504 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1506 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1507 systems without xattr support.
1509 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1510 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1511 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1513 ** Changes in behavior
1515 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1516 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1517 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1518 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1520 ** Improved robustness
1522 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1523 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1524 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1525 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1526 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1527 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1528 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1529 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1530 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1534 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1535 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1537 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1538 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1539 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1540 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1541 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1544 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1548 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1549 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1550 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1554 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1555 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1556 data was read, or on process exit.
1557 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1559 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1560 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1561 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1562 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1564 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1565 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1566 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1567 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1569 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1570 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1572 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1573 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1575 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1576 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1577 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1579 ** Changes in behavior
1581 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1582 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1583 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1585 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1586 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1588 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1589 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1590 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1593 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1597 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1599 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1600 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1601 install: Never copies xattrs
1603 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1604 from overwriting any existing destination file
1606 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1607 mode where this feature is available.
1609 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1610 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1611 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1612 do not modify the destination at all.
1614 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1616 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1620 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1621 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1623 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1625 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1626 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1628 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1629 processing the first file name
1631 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1632 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1633 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1634 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1636 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1637 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1639 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1640 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1643 ** Changes in behavior
1645 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1646 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1648 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1649 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1650 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1652 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1653 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1655 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1657 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1658 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1659 is still marked with a '+'.
1662 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1666 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1667 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1671 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1672 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1673 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1674 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1675 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1676 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1678 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1679 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1681 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1682 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1684 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1686 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1687 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1688 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1690 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1691 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1693 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1694 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1695 used to factor large numbers.
1697 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1700 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1702 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1704 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1705 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1707 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1708 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1709 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1710 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1712 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1713 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1714 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1716 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1717 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1721 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1723 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1724 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1726 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1727 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1729 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1731 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1732 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1736 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1737 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1738 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1740 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1742 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1743 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1744 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1746 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1747 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1748 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1750 ** Changes in behavior
1752 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1753 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1756 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1760 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1761 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1762 'futimens' system calls.
1766 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1768 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1769 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1770 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1772 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1773 with no USERNAME argument.
1775 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1776 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1777 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1779 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1780 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1781 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1782 number of fields for some inputs.
1784 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1785 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1787 ** Changes in behavior
1789 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1790 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1793 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1797 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1799 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1800 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1801 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1802 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1804 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1805 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1807 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1808 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1810 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1811 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1813 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1814 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1815 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1816 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1818 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1819 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1820 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1821 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1822 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1823 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1825 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1826 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1828 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1829 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1830 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1832 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1833 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1835 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1836 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1838 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1839 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1840 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1841 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1843 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1844 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1846 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1847 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1849 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1850 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1851 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1855 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1856 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1858 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1859 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1860 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1861 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1865 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1866 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1868 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1870 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1874 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1875 which have negative errno values.
1879 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1883 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1887 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1888 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1891 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1895 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1896 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1897 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1899 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1900 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1901 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1902 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1906 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1907 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1908 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1909 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1912 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1916 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1918 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1919 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1920 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1923 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1927 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1928 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1930 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1932 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1934 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1936 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1940 ** Changes in behavior
1942 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1943 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1945 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1946 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1948 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1949 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1950 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1954 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1955 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1956 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1957 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1958 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1959 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1960 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1961 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1962 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1963 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1964 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1966 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1967 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1968 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1971 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1974 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1975 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1976 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1978 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1979 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1980 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1983 ** New build options
1985 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1986 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1987 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1988 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1990 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1991 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1992 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1993 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1994 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1995 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1996 of "make check" fail.
1998 ** Remove deprecated options
2000 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2001 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2002 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2003 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2004 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2006 ** Improved robustness
2008 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2009 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2010 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2011 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2012 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2013 loss of the contents of a/f.
2015 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2016 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2020 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2021 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2022 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2024 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2025 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2026 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2027 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2029 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2030 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2031 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2032 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2033 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2034 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2035 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2036 destination is a symlink.
2038 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2040 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2041 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2043 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2044 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2046 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2048 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2049 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2051 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2052 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2054 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2057 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2058 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2060 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2061 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2063 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2064 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2065 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2066 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2068 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2069 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2070 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2072 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2073 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2074 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2076 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2077 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2078 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2079 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2081 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2082 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2083 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2085 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2086 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2088 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2089 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2091 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2093 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2094 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2095 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2097 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2098 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2100 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2101 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2103 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2104 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2106 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2107 [present in the original version]
2110 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2114 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2116 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2117 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2118 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2120 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2121 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2123 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2127 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2128 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2130 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2131 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2133 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2134 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2136 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2137 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2138 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2139 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2140 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2141 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2143 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2144 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2147 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2148 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2150 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2153 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2154 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2155 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2157 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2158 directory is unreadable.
2160 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2161 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2162 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2164 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2165 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2166 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2167 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2168 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2171 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2172 Before it would print nothing.
2174 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2176 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2177 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2178 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2179 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2180 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2181 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2182 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2183 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2185 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2189 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2190 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2191 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2193 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2194 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2195 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2196 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2199 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2203 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2204 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2205 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2206 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2207 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2208 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2209 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2211 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2212 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2213 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2214 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2215 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2216 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2217 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2218 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2220 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2221 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2222 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2225 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2229 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2230 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2232 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2233 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2234 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2236 ** Improved robustness
2238 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2239 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2240 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2243 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2247 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2248 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2249 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2250 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2251 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2253 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2257 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2260 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2264 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2265 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2266 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2267 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2269 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2270 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2272 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2273 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2274 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2277 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2279 ** Improved robustness
2281 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2282 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2284 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2285 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2286 or NFS-mounted partition.
2288 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2289 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2293 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2294 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2295 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2296 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2297 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2298 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2300 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2301 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2303 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2304 or neglect to report file removal.
2306 For the "groups" command:
2308 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2309 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2311 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2313 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2315 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2319 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2320 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2323 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2325 ** Changes in behavior
2327 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2328 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2329 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2330 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2332 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2333 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2334 a final './' or '../' component.
2336 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2337 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2338 this only for pipes.
2340 ** Infrastructure changes
2342 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2343 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2344 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2345 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2349 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2350 name is "." or "..".
2352 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2353 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2354 dirent.d_type support.
2356 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2357 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2359 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2360 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2361 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2362 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2365 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2367 ** Changes in behavior
2369 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2373 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2374 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2378 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2379 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2380 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2382 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2383 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2385 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2386 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2388 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2390 ** Improved robustness
2392 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2393 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2394 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2396 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2397 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2400 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2401 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2403 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2404 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2406 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2407 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2409 ** Changes in behavior
2411 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2412 where the two are distinct.
2414 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2415 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2416 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2417 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2418 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2419 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2420 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2421 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2422 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2423 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2424 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2425 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2426 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2427 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2428 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2429 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2430 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2432 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2433 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2434 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2436 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2437 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2438 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2439 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2442 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2443 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2447 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2448 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2449 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2450 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2452 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2453 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2454 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2456 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2457 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2458 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2459 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2460 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2463 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2464 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2466 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2467 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2468 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2469 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2471 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2472 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2473 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2475 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2476 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2477 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2478 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2480 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2481 and sticky) with the -m option.
2483 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2484 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2485 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2486 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2487 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2489 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2490 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2492 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2496 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2497 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2498 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2499 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2501 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2503 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2505 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2506 silently ignoring one of them.
2508 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2509 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2510 containing this change was 5.92.
2512 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2513 automatically newline terminated.
2515 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2516 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2517 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2518 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2521 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2522 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2523 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2526 ** Scheduled for removal
2528 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2529 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2531 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2532 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2533 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2534 command to unlink a directory.
2536 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2537 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2538 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2539 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2543 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2544 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2545 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2546 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2547 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2548 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2552 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2553 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2555 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2557 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2558 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2559 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2561 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2562 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2565 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2566 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2568 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2569 list directories before files.
2571 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2572 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2573 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2574 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2577 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2579 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2581 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2582 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2583 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2585 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2586 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2590 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2591 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2592 usually printing nothing.
2594 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2596 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2597 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2598 them with hard-linked directories.
2600 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2601 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2602 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2604 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2605 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2606 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2608 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2611 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2612 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2614 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2615 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2617 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2618 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2620 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2621 all command-line arguments.
2623 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2625 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2627 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2628 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2630 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2632 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2633 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2634 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2635 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2636 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2638 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2639 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2641 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2642 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2643 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2644 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2646 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2648 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2652 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2653 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2655 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2656 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2658 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2659 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2661 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2662 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2664 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2665 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2667 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2669 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2670 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2671 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2674 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2676 ** Build-related bug fixes
2678 installing .mo files would fail
2681 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2685 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2687 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2690 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2694 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2695 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2699 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2701 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2702 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2704 ** Deprecated options
2706 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2707 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2709 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2713 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2715 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2716 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2717 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2718 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2720 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2723 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2729 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2734 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2736 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2738 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2739 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2740 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2742 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2743 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2744 problematic usages. These include:
2746 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2747 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2748 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2749 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2750 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2751 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2752 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2753 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2754 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2756 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2757 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2759 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2760 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2761 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2762 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2764 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2765 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2766 between binary and text files.
2768 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2772 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2776 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2777 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2779 head tac tail tee tr
2780 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2782 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2783 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2785 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2786 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2787 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2789 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2791 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2793 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2794 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2795 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2799 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2801 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2802 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2804 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2805 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2806 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2810 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2811 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2815 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2816 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2817 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2821 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2822 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2826 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2828 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2830 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2834 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2835 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2836 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2838 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2839 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2840 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2841 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2842 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2844 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2848 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2849 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2850 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2852 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2854 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2855 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2856 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2857 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2859 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2861 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2862 rather than silently wrapping around.
2864 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2865 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2867 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2868 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2870 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2871 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2872 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2873 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2875 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2877 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2879 ** Improved robustness
2881 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2882 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2883 no matter how large the result.
2885 ** Improved portability
2887 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2888 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2890 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2892 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2893 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2894 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2896 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2897 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2901 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2902 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2904 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2906 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2907 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2908 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2909 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2911 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2912 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2914 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2915 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2916 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2918 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2920 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2921 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2923 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2924 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2926 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2928 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2929 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2931 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2932 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2934 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2935 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2936 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2938 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2940 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2942 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2946 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2948 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2949 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2950 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2952 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2953 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2955 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2956 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2957 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2959 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2960 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2962 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2963 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2964 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2965 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2967 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2968 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2970 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2971 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2972 the file system does not support it.
2974 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2976 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2977 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2979 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2981 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2982 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2984 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2985 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2986 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2987 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2989 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2990 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2993 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2994 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2995 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2996 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2998 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2999 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3000 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3001 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3003 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3004 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3006 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3008 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3009 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3010 reporting incorrect results.
3014 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3015 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3017 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3020 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3022 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3023 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3025 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3026 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3028 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3031 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3032 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3033 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3034 the file name does not look like a page range.
3036 printf has several changes:
3038 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3039 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3041 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3042 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3043 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3045 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3046 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3049 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3050 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3052 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3053 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3055 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3057 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3058 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3060 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3062 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3064 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3065 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3066 when first encountering the directory.
3070 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3071 output; POSIX requires this.
3073 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3074 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3076 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3078 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3079 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3081 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3082 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3084 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3085 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3086 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3087 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3088 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3089 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3090 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3092 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3093 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3094 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3096 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3097 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3099 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3101 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3103 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3104 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3105 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3106 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3108 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3112 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3113 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3114 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3115 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3116 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3118 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3119 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3120 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3122 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3123 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3125 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3126 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3128 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3129 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3130 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3131 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3132 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3134 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3135 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3137 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3138 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3140 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3142 nocreat do not create the output file
3143 excl fail if the output file already exists
3144 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3145 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3147 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3149 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3150 direct use direct I/O for data
3151 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3152 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3153 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3154 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3155 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3157 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3159 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3160 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3163 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3164 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3165 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3166 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3167 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3168 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3170 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3171 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3173 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3176 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3178 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3180 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3181 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3183 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3184 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3185 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3187 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3188 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3189 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3191 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3193 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3194 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3196 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3197 for compatibility with bash.
3199 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3201 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3202 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3203 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3204 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3206 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3207 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3209 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3210 ls supports TABSIZE.
3211 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3212 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3213 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3215 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3218 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3220 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3221 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3222 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3223 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3224 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3225 an offset, not as a file name.
3227 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3228 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3230 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3231 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3233 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3234 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3236 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3237 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3238 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3240 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3241 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3243 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3244 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3248 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3250 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3252 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3256 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3257 or more arguments between partitions.
3259 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3260 holes in the destination.
3262 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3263 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3264 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3265 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3266 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3267 terminates immediately.
3269 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3271 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3273 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3274 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3275 not the empty string.
3277 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3278 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3282 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3283 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3284 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3287 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3294 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3298 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3299 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3301 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3302 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3304 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3305 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3306 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3309 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3313 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3314 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3316 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3317 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3319 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3320 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3321 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3323 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3325 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3328 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3330 ** Configuration option
3332 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3333 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3337 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3338 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3342 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3343 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3344 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3347 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3348 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3349 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3350 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3351 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3352 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3353 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3356 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3360 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3361 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3362 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3364 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3365 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3367 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3369 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3370 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3371 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3372 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3374 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3376 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3377 not just the ones that reference directories
3379 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3380 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3382 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3383 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3384 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3386 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3387 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3388 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3389 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3390 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3391 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3393 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3398 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3399 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3401 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3403 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3405 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3407 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3408 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3410 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3411 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3413 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3415 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3419 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3421 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3423 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3424 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3425 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3426 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3427 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3429 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3430 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3432 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3433 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3435 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3436 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3438 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3439 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3440 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3444 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3445 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3446 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3447 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3448 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3449 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3450 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3451 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3452 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3453 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3454 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3455 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3456 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3457 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3459 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3461 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3462 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3464 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3466 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3468 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3469 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3471 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3473 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3474 without a trailing newline.
3476 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3477 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3479 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3482 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3486 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3488 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3490 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3491 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3492 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3493 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3495 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3497 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3498 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3499 be printed without leading spaces.
3501 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3502 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3507 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3508 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3509 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3511 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3513 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3514 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3516 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3517 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3519 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3520 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3522 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3524 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3526 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3528 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3529 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3531 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3533 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3535 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3536 byte offsets are specified.
3539 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3542 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3545 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3546 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3547 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3548 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3549 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3550 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3551 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3552 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3553 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3554 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3555 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3556 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3557 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3558 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3559 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3560 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3561 directory where M has write access.
3562 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3563 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3564 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3567 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3568 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3569 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3570 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3571 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3572 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3573 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3574 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3575 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3576 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3577 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3578 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3579 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3580 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3581 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3582 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3583 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3584 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3585 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3586 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3587 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3588 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3589 appeared one additional time.
3591 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3592 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3593 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3594 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3597 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3598 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3599 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3600 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3601 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3602 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3603 if there were more than 338.
3605 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3606 - false --help now exits nonzero
3609 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3610 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3611 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3612 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3615 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3616 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3617 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3618 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3619 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3622 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3623 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3624 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3625 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3626 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3627 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3628 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3631 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3632 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3633 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3634 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3635 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3636 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3638 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3639 under certain unusual conditions
3640 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3641 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3644 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3645 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3646 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3647 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3648 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3649 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3650 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3651 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3652 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3653 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3654 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3655 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3656 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3657 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3658 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3659 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3662 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3663 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3666 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3667 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3668 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3669 involving hard-linked directories
3670 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3671 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3672 character-special and block files
3675 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3676 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3677 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3678 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3679 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3680 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3681 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3682 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3683 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3685 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3686 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3687 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3688 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3689 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3690 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3691 specified on the command line.
3692 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3693 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3694 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3695 the first file untouched.
3696 * readlink: new program
3697 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3698 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3699 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3700 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3701 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3702 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3705 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3706 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3707 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3708 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3709 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3710 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3711 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3712 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3713 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3714 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3715 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3716 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3718 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3719 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3720 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3722 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3723 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3724 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3725 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3726 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3727 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3728 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3729 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3732 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3733 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3736 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3737 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3738 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3739 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3740 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3741 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3742 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3745 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3746 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3748 ========================================================================
3749 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3750 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3753 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3755 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3756 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3757 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3758 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3759 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3760 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3761 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3762 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3763 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3764 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3765 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3766 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3768 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3769 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3770 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3771 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3773 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3776 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3778 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3779 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3780 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3781 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3782 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3783 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3784 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3787 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3788 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3789 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3790 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3791 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3792 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3793 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3794 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3795 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3796 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3797 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3798 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3799 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3800 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3801 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3802 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3804 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3805 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3807 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3808 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3809 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3810 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3811 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3812 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3814 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3815 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3816 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3817 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3818 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3819 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3820 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3822 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3823 the source files in the following example:
3824 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3825 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3826 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3827 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3828 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3829 links between source files with --preserve=links
3830 * cp accepts new options:
3831 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3832 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3833 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3834 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3835 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3836 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3837 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3838 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3839 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3841 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3842 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3843 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3844 even though it's older than dest.
3845 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3846 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3847 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3848 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3849 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3851 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3852 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3853 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3854 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3855 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3856 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3857 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3859 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3860 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3861 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3863 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3864 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3865 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3866 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3867 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3868 This is the default.
3870 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3871 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3872 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3873 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3874 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3876 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3879 ========================================================================
3880 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3881 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3884 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3885 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3887 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3888 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3889 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3890 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3891 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3893 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3894 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3895 that specifies a non-directory
3898 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3899 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3900 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3901 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3902 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3903 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3904 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3905 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3906 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3907 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3908 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3909 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3910 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3911 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3912 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3913 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3914 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3915 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3916 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3917 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3918 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3919 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3920 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3921 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3923 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3924 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3925 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3927 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3929 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3930 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3932 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3933 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3934 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3935 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3936 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3938 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3939 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3940 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3941 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3942 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3944 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3946 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3947 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3948 * still more portability fixes
3949 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3950 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3952 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3954 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3956 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3958 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3959 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3960 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3961 there is any time remaining
3962 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3964 ========================================================================
3965 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3966 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3968 This package began as the union of the following:
3969 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3971 ========================================================================
3973 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3975 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3976 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3977 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3978 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3979 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3980 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.