1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
8 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
9 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
10 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
11 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
16 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
18 ** Changes in behavior
20 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
21 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
24 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
28 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
29 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
30 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
31 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
32 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
33 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
34 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
35 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
37 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
38 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
39 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
40 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
41 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
43 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
44 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
46 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
47 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
49 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
50 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
52 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
53 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
55 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
56 additional static suffix to output file names.
58 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
59 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
60 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
62 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
63 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
67 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
68 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
71 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
72 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
73 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
74 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
75 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
76 typically still point to one of the hard links.
78 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
79 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
80 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
81 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
82 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
84 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
85 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
86 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
87 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
91 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
92 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
93 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
95 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
96 instead of causing a usage failure.
98 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
101 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
105 realpath: print resolved file names.
109 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
112 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
115 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
116 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
117 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
118 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
119 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
122 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
123 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
124 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
126 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
127 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
130 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
131 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
132 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
133 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
136 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
138 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
141 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
142 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
143 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
145 ** Changes in behavior
147 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
148 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
149 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
150 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
151 usually-short referent instead.
153 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
154 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
155 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
156 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
159 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
163 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
164 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
165 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
167 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
168 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
170 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
171 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
175 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
176 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
178 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
179 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
180 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
181 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
183 ** Changes in behavior
185 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
186 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
187 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
191 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
192 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
193 only .tar.xz files is enough.
196 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
200 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
201 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
202 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
204 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
205 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
207 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
208 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
209 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
210 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
211 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
213 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
214 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
215 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
216 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
217 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
218 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
219 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
220 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
222 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
223 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
225 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
226 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
228 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
231 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
232 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
233 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
235 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
236 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
237 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
240 ** Changes in behavior
242 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
243 when -v or -c specified.
245 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
246 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
250 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
251 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
252 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
253 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
254 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
256 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
257 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
258 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
260 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
261 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
262 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
263 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
264 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
265 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
266 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
268 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
269 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
270 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
274 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
275 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
277 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
280 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
281 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
283 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
284 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
286 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
287 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
289 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
291 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
295 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
296 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
298 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
301 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
305 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
306 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
308 ** Changes in behavior
310 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
311 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
312 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
313 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
314 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
315 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
317 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
318 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
319 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
323 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
326 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
330 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
331 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
334 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
335 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
338 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
339 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
342 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
345 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
348 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
351 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
356 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
357 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
358 processed portion thereof.
360 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
361 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
363 ** Changes in behavior
365 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
366 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
367 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
369 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
370 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
371 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
373 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
374 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
376 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
377 Use --preserve-context instead.
379 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
382 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
386 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
387 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
388 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
389 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
390 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
392 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
393 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
395 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
396 reject file names invalid for that file system.
398 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
399 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
403 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
404 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
405 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
406 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
407 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
408 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
409 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
410 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
412 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
413 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
414 the same number of fields are output for each line.
416 ** Changes in behavior
418 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
419 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
420 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
423 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
427 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
428 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
436 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
437 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
439 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
440 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
442 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
443 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
445 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
446 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
447 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
450 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
451 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
453 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
454 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
455 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
457 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
459 ** Changes in behavior
461 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
462 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
463 to the number of available processors.
467 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
470 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
474 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
475 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
476 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
477 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
479 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
480 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
481 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
483 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
484 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
486 ** Changes in behavior
488 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
489 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
491 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
492 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
493 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
494 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
495 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
496 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
498 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
499 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
500 the same way as the others.
503 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
507 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
508 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
509 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
511 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
512 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
514 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
515 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
516 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
518 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
521 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
524 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
525 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
526 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
528 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
529 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
530 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
531 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
535 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
536 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
538 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
541 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
542 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
544 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
546 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
547 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
548 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
550 ** Changes in behavior
552 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
553 rather than its aliased target.
555 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
556 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
557 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
559 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
560 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
561 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
562 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
563 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
564 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
565 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
566 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
568 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
570 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
572 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
573 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
576 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
577 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
578 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
579 control like taskset for example.
581 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
583 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
584 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
585 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
586 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
587 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
588 includes %C when context information is available.
590 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
591 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
592 rather than a file system attribute.
594 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
595 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
596 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
597 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
599 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
600 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
601 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
603 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
604 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
605 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
608 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
612 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
615 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
617 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
620 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
621 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
622 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
623 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
625 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
626 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
627 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
631 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
632 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
634 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
635 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
636 duration after the initial signal was sent.
638 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
639 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
640 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
641 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
642 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
643 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
644 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
645 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
646 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
648 ** Changes in behavior
650 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
651 sequence when it would be a no-op.
653 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
654 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
657 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
661 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
662 of available processors, which may not have been the case
663 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
668 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
669 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
671 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
672 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
673 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
674 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
676 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
677 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
678 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
681 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
685 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
686 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
689 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
690 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
691 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
693 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
696 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
697 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
698 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
699 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
701 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
702 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
705 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
706 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
707 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
708 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
710 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
711 renamed-aside and then recreated.
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
714 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
715 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
716 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
717 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
719 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
720 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
723 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
724 processes will not intersperse their output.
725 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
728 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
732 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
735 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
736 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
738 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
739 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
740 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
741 the presence of the empty string argument.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
744 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
745 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
746 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
747 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
749 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
752 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
753 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
754 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
756 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
757 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
758 and with a malicious user on the same system
759 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
760 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
763 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
767 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
768 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
769 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
771 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
772 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
773 offending directory and all "contents."
775 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
776 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
777 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
779 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
780 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
781 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
783 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
784 processes will not intersperse their output.
785 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
786 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
788 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
789 output the name of the file to stdout.
790 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
792 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
793 call fails with errno == EACCES.
794 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
796 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
797 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
800 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
801 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
802 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
804 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
805 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
806 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
807 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
808 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
809 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
811 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
812 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
813 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
814 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
816 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
817 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
819 ** Changes in behavior
821 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
822 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
823 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
824 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
825 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
827 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
828 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
829 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
830 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
832 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
834 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
835 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
836 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
837 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
838 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
842 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
846 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
847 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
849 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
850 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
852 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
853 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
854 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
856 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
857 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
860 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
864 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
865 when the source file doesn't have write access.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
868 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
869 to accommodate leap seconds.
870 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
872 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
873 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
874 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
876 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
878 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
879 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
880 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
882 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
883 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
884 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
885 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
886 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
890 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
891 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
892 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
893 directory or a symlink to a directory.
895 ** Changes in behavior
897 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
898 environment variable is set.
900 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
901 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
902 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
906 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
907 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
908 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
909 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
911 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
912 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
913 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
914 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
918 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
919 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
920 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
922 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
923 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
924 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
925 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
926 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
927 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
930 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
931 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
934 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
938 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
939 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
940 and libraries tested at configure time.
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
943 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
944 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
946 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
947 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
949 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
950 printing a summary to stderr.
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
953 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
954 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
955 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
957 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
958 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
960 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
961 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
962 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
963 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
965 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
966 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
967 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
968 which is relatively unusual.
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
971 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
972 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
973 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
974 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
975 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
976 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
977 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
981 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
982 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
983 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
984 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
985 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
989 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
990 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
992 ** Changes in behavior
994 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
995 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
996 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
997 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
998 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1001 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1005 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1006 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1008 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1009 before data copying has started.
1011 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1012 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1014 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1015 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1016 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1017 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1019 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1020 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1021 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1022 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1024 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1029 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1030 for its standard streams.
1032 ** Changes in behavior
1034 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1035 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1036 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1037 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1038 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1039 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1041 ** Deprecated options
1043 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1044 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1048 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1050 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1051 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1052 a btrfs file system.
1054 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1056 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1057 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1059 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1060 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1063 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1067 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1068 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1069 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1070 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1072 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1073 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1074 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1075 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1076 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1081 make check: two tests have been corrected
1085 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1086 inherited from gnulib.
1089 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1093 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1094 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1095 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1096 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1098 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1099 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1101 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1103 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1104 systems without xattr support.
1106 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1107 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1108 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1110 ** Changes in behavior
1112 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1113 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1114 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1115 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1117 ** Improved robustness
1119 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1120 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1121 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1122 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1123 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1124 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1125 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1126 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1127 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1131 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1132 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1134 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1135 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1136 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1137 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1138 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1141 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1145 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1146 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1147 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1151 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1152 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1153 data was read, or on process exit.
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1156 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1157 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1158 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1161 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1162 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1163 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1166 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1167 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1169 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1170 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1172 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1173 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1174 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1176 ** Changes in behavior
1178 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1179 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1180 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1182 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1183 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1185 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1186 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1187 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1190 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1194 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1196 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1197 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1198 install: Never copies xattrs
1200 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1201 from overwriting any existing destination file
1203 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1204 mode where this feature is available.
1206 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1207 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1208 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1209 do not modify the destination at all.
1211 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1213 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1217 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1220 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1222 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1223 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1225 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1226 processing the first file name
1228 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1229 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1230 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1231 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1233 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1234 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1236 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1237 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1240 ** Changes in behavior
1242 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1243 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1245 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1246 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1247 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1249 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1250 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1252 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1254 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1255 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1256 is still marked with a '+'.
1259 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1263 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1264 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1268 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1269 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1270 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1271 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1272 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1273 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1275 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1276 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1278 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1279 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1281 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1283 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1284 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1285 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1287 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1288 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1290 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1291 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1292 used to factor large numbers.
1294 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1297 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1299 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1301 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1302 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1304 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1305 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1306 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1307 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1309 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1310 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1311 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1313 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1314 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1318 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1320 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1321 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1323 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1324 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1326 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1328 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1329 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1333 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1334 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1335 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1337 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1339 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1340 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1341 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1343 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1344 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1345 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1347 ** Changes in behavior
1349 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1350 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1353 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1357 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1358 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1359 'futimens' system calls.
1363 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1365 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1366 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1367 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1369 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1370 with no USERNAME argument.
1372 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1373 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1374 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1376 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1377 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1378 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1379 number of fields for some inputs.
1381 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1382 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1384 ** Changes in behavior
1386 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1387 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1390 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1394 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1396 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1397 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1398 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1399 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1401 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1402 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1404 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1405 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1407 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1408 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1410 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1411 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1412 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1413 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1415 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1416 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1417 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1418 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1419 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1420 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1422 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1423 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1425 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1426 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1427 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1429 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1430 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1432 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1433 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1435 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1436 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1437 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1438 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1440 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1441 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1443 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1444 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1446 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1447 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1448 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1452 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1453 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1455 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1456 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1457 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1458 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1462 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1463 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1465 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1467 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1471 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1472 which have negative errno values.
1476 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1480 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1484 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1485 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1488 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1492 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1493 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1494 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1496 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1497 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1498 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1499 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1503 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1504 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1505 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1506 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1509 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1513 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1515 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1516 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1520 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1524 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1525 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1527 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1529 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1531 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1533 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1537 ** Changes in behavior
1539 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1540 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1542 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1543 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1545 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1546 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1547 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1551 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1552 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1553 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1554 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1555 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1556 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1557 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1558 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1559 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1560 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1561 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1563 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1564 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1565 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1568 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1571 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1572 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1573 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1575 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1576 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1577 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1580 ** New build options
1582 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1583 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1584 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1585 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1587 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1588 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1589 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1590 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1591 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1592 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1593 of "make check" fail.
1595 ** Remove deprecated options
1597 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1598 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1599 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1600 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1601 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1603 ** Improved robustness
1605 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1606 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1607 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1608 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1609 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1610 loss of the contents of a/f.
1612 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1613 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1617 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1618 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1619 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1621 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1622 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1623 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1624 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1626 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1627 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1628 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1629 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1630 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1631 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1632 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1633 destination is a symlink.
1635 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1637 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1638 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1640 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1641 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1643 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1645 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1646 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1648 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1649 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1651 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1654 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1655 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1657 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1658 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1660 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1661 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1662 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1663 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1665 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1666 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1667 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1669 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1670 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1671 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1673 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1674 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1675 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1676 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1678 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1679 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1680 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1682 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1683 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1685 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1686 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1688 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1690 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1691 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1692 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1694 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1695 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1697 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1698 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1700 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1701 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1703 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1704 [present in the original version]
1707 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1711 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1713 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1714 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1715 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1717 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1718 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1720 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1724 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1725 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1727 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1728 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1730 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1731 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1733 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1734 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1735 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1736 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1737 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1738 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1740 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1741 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1744 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1745 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1747 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1750 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1751 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1752 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1754 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1755 directory is unreadable.
1757 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1758 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1759 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1761 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1762 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1763 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1764 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1765 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1768 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1769 Before it would print nothing.
1771 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1773 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1774 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1775 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1776 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1777 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1778 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1779 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1780 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1782 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1786 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1787 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1788 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1790 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1791 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1792 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1793 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1796 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1800 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1801 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1802 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1803 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1804 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1805 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1806 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1808 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1809 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1810 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1811 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1812 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1813 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1814 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1815 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1817 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1818 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1819 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1822 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1826 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1827 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1829 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1830 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1831 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1833 ** Improved robustness
1835 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1836 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1837 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1840 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1844 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1845 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1846 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1847 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1848 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1850 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1854 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1857 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1861 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1862 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1863 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1864 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1866 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1867 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1869 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1870 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1871 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1874 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1876 ** Improved robustness
1878 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1879 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1881 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1882 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1883 or NFS-mounted partition.
1885 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1886 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1890 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1891 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1892 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1893 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1894 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1895 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1897 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1898 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1900 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1901 or neglect to report file removal.
1903 For the "groups" command:
1905 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1906 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1908 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1910 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1912 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1916 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1917 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1920 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1922 ** Changes in behavior
1924 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1925 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1926 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1927 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1929 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1930 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1931 a final './' or '../' component.
1933 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1934 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1935 this only for pipes.
1937 ** Infrastructure changes
1939 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1940 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1941 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1942 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1946 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1947 name is "." or "..".
1949 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1950 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1951 dirent.d_type support.
1953 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1954 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1956 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1957 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1958 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1959 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1962 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1964 ** Changes in behavior
1966 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1970 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1971 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1975 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1976 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1977 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1979 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1980 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1982 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1983 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1985 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1987 ** Improved robustness
1989 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1990 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1991 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1993 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1994 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1997 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1998 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2000 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2001 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2003 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2004 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2006 ** Changes in behavior
2008 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2009 where the two are distinct.
2011 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2012 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2013 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2014 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2015 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2016 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2017 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2018 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2019 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2020 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2021 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2022 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2023 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2024 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2025 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2026 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2027 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2029 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2030 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2031 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2033 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2034 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2035 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2036 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2039 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2040 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2044 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2045 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2046 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2047 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2049 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2050 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2051 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2053 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2054 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2055 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2056 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2057 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2060 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2061 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2063 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2064 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2065 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2066 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2068 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2069 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2070 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2072 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2073 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2074 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2075 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2077 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2078 and sticky) with the -m option.
2080 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2081 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2082 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2083 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2084 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2086 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2087 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2089 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2093 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2094 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2095 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2096 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2098 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2100 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2102 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2103 silently ignoring one of them.
2105 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2106 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2107 containing this change was 5.92.
2109 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2110 automatically newline terminated.
2112 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2113 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2114 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2115 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2118 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2119 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2120 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2123 ** Scheduled for removal
2125 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2126 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2128 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2129 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2130 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2131 command to unlink a directory.
2133 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2134 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2135 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2136 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2140 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2141 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2142 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2143 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2144 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2145 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2149 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2150 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2152 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2154 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2155 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2156 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2158 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2159 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2162 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2163 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2165 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2166 list directories before files.
2168 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2169 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2170 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2171 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2174 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2176 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2178 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2179 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2180 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2182 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2183 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2187 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2188 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2189 usually printing nothing.
2191 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2193 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2194 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2195 them with hard-linked directories.
2197 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2198 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2199 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2201 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2202 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2203 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2205 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2208 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2209 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2211 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2212 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2214 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2215 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2217 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2218 all command-line arguments.
2220 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2222 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2224 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2225 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2227 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2229 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2230 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2231 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2232 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2233 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2235 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2236 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2238 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2239 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2240 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2241 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2243 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2245 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2249 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2250 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2252 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2253 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2255 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2256 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2258 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2259 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2261 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2262 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2264 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2266 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2267 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2268 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2271 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2273 ** Build-related bug fixes
2275 installing .mo files would fail
2278 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2282 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2284 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2287 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2291 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2292 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2296 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2298 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2299 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2301 ** Deprecated options
2303 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2304 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2306 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2310 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2312 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2313 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2314 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2315 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2317 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2320 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2326 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2331 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2333 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2335 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2336 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2337 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2339 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2340 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2341 problematic usages. These include:
2343 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2344 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2345 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2346 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2347 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2348 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2349 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2350 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2351 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2353 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2354 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2356 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2357 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2358 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2359 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2361 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2362 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2363 between binary and text files.
2365 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2369 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2373 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2374 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2376 head tac tail tee tr
2377 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2379 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2380 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2382 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2383 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2384 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2386 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2388 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2390 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2391 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2392 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2396 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2398 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2399 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2401 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2402 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2403 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2407 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2408 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2412 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2413 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2414 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2418 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2419 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2423 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2425 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2427 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2431 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2432 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2433 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2435 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2436 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2437 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2438 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2439 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2441 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2445 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2446 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2447 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2449 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2451 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2452 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2453 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2454 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2456 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2458 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2459 rather than silently wrapping around.
2461 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2462 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2464 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2465 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2467 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2468 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2469 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2470 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2472 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2474 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2476 ** Improved robustness
2478 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2479 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2480 no matter how large the result.
2482 ** Improved portability
2484 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2485 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2487 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2489 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2490 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2491 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2493 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2494 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2498 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2499 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2501 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2503 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2504 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2505 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2506 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2508 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2509 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2511 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2512 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2513 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2515 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2517 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2518 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2520 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2521 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2523 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2525 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2526 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2528 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2529 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2531 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2532 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2533 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2535 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2537 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2539 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2543 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2545 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2546 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2547 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2549 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2550 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2552 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2553 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2554 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2556 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2557 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2559 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2560 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2561 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2562 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2564 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2565 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2567 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2568 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2569 the file system does not support it.
2571 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2573 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2574 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2576 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2578 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2579 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2581 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2582 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2583 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2584 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2586 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2587 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2590 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2591 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2592 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2593 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2595 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2596 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2597 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2598 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2600 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2601 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2603 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2605 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2606 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2607 reporting incorrect results.
2611 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2612 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2614 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2617 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2619 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2620 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2622 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2623 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2625 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2628 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2629 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2630 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2631 the file name does not look like a page range.
2633 printf has several changes:
2635 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2636 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2638 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2639 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2640 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2642 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2643 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2646 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2647 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2649 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2650 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2652 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2654 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2655 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2657 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2659 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2661 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2662 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2663 when first encountering the directory.
2667 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2668 output; POSIX requires this.
2670 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2671 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2673 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2675 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2676 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2678 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2679 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2681 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2682 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2683 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2684 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2685 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2686 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2687 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2689 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2690 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2691 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2693 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2694 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2696 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2698 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2700 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2701 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2702 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2703 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2705 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2709 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2710 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2711 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2712 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2713 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2715 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2716 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2717 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2719 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2720 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2722 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2723 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2725 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2726 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2727 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2728 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2729 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2731 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2732 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2734 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2735 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2737 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2739 nocreat do not create the output file
2740 excl fail if the output file already exists
2741 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2742 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2744 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2746 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2747 direct use direct I/O for data
2748 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2749 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2750 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2751 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2752 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2754 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2756 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2757 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2760 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2761 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2762 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2763 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2764 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2765 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2767 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2768 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2770 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2773 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2775 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2777 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2778 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2780 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2781 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2782 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2784 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2785 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2786 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2788 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2790 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2791 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2793 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2794 for compatibility with bash.
2796 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2798 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2799 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2800 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2801 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2803 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2804 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2806 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2807 ls supports TABSIZE.
2808 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2809 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2810 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2812 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2815 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2817 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2818 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2819 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2820 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2821 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2822 an offset, not as a file name.
2824 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2825 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2827 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2828 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2830 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2831 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2833 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2834 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2835 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2837 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2838 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2840 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2841 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2845 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2847 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2849 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2853 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2854 or more arguments between partitions.
2856 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2857 holes in the destination.
2859 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2860 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2861 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2862 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2863 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2864 terminates immediately.
2866 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2868 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2870 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2871 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2872 not the empty string.
2874 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2875 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2879 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2880 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2881 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2884 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2891 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2895 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2896 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2898 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2899 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2901 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2902 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2903 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2906 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2910 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2911 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2913 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2914 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2916 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2917 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2918 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2920 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2922 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2925 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2927 ** Configuration option
2929 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2930 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2934 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2935 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2939 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2940 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2941 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2944 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2945 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2946 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2947 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2948 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2949 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2950 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2953 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2957 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2958 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2959 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2961 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2962 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2964 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2966 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2967 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2968 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2969 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2971 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2973 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2974 not just the ones that reference directories
2976 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2977 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2979 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2980 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2981 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2983 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2984 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2985 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2986 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2987 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2988 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2990 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2995 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2996 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2998 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3000 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3002 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3004 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3005 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3007 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3008 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3010 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3012 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3016 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3018 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3020 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3021 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3022 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3023 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3024 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3026 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3027 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3029 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3030 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3032 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3033 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3035 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3036 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3037 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3041 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3042 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3043 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3044 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3045 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3046 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3047 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3048 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3049 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3050 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3051 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3052 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3053 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3054 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3056 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3058 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3059 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3061 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3063 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3065 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3066 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3068 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3070 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3071 without a trailing newline.
3073 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3074 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3076 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3079 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3083 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3085 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3087 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3088 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3089 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3090 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3092 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3094 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3095 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3096 be printed without leading spaces.
3098 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3099 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3104 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3105 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3106 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3108 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3110 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3111 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3113 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3114 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3116 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3117 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3119 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3121 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3123 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3125 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3126 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3128 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3130 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3132 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3133 byte offsets are specified.
3136 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3139 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3142 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3143 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3144 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3145 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3146 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3147 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3148 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3149 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3150 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3151 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3152 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3153 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3154 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3155 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3156 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3157 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3158 directory where M has write access.
3159 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3160 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3161 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3164 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3165 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3166 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3167 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3168 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3169 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3170 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3171 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3172 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3173 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3174 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3175 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3176 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3177 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3178 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3179 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3180 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3181 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3182 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3183 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3184 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3185 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3186 appeared one additional time.
3188 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3189 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3190 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3191 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3194 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3195 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3196 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3197 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3198 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3199 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3200 if there were more than 338.
3202 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3203 - false --help now exits nonzero
3206 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3207 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3208 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3209 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3212 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3213 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3214 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3215 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3216 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3219 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3220 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3221 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3222 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3223 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3224 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3225 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3228 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3229 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3230 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3231 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3232 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3233 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3235 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3236 under certain unusual conditions
3237 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3238 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3241 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3242 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3243 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3244 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3245 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3246 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3247 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3248 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3249 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3250 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3251 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3252 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3253 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3254 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3255 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3256 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3259 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3260 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3263 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3264 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3265 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3266 involving hard-linked directories
3267 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3268 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3269 character-special and block files
3272 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3273 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3274 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3275 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3276 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3277 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3278 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3279 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3280 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3282 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3283 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3284 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3285 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3286 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3287 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3288 specified on the command line.
3289 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3290 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3291 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3292 the first file untouched.
3293 * readlink: new program
3294 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3295 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3296 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3297 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3298 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3299 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3302 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3303 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3304 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3305 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3306 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3307 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3308 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3309 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3310 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3311 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3312 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3313 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3315 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3316 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3317 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3319 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3320 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3321 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3322 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3323 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3324 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3325 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3326 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3329 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3330 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3333 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3334 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3335 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3336 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3337 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3338 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3339 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3342 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3343 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3345 ========================================================================
3346 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3347 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3350 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3352 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3353 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3354 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3355 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3356 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3357 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3358 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3359 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3360 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3361 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3362 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3363 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3365 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3366 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3367 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3368 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3370 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3373 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3375 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3376 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3377 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3378 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3379 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3380 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3381 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3384 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3385 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3386 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3387 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3388 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3389 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3390 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3391 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3392 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3393 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3394 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3395 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3396 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3397 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3398 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3399 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3401 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3402 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3404 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3405 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3406 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3407 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3408 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3409 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3411 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3412 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3413 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3414 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3415 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3416 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3417 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3419 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3420 the source files in the following example:
3421 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3422 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3423 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3424 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3425 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3426 links between source files with --preserve=links
3427 * cp accepts new options:
3428 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3429 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3430 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3431 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3432 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3433 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3434 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3435 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3436 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3438 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3439 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3440 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3441 even though it's older than dest.
3442 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3443 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3444 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3445 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3446 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3448 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3449 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3450 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3451 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3452 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3453 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3454 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3456 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3457 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3458 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3460 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3461 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3462 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3463 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3464 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3465 This is the default.
3467 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3468 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3469 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3470 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3471 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3473 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3476 ========================================================================
3477 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3478 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3481 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3482 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3484 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3485 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3486 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3487 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3488 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3490 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3491 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3492 that specifies a non-directory
3495 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3496 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3497 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3498 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3499 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3500 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3501 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3502 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3503 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3504 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3505 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3506 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3507 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3508 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3509 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3510 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3511 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3512 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3513 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3514 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3515 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3516 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3517 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3518 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3520 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3521 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3522 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3524 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3526 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3527 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3529 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3530 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3531 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3532 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3533 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3535 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3536 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3537 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3538 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3539 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3541 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3543 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3544 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3545 * still more portability fixes
3546 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3547 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3549 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3551 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3553 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3555 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3556 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3557 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3558 there is any time remaining
3559 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3561 ========================================================================
3562 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3563 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3565 This package began as the union of the following:
3566 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3568 ========================================================================
3570 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3572 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3573 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3574 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3575 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3576 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3577 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.