1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
8 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
10 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
11 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
14 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
15 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
16 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
17 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
19 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
20 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
21 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
22 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
24 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
25 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
27 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
28 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
29 character at the 4GiB position.
30 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
32 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
33 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
35 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
36 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
38 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
39 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
40 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
44 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
45 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
46 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
47 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
49 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
50 on stderr approximately every second.
52 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
53 other than the default newline character.
55 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
56 a useful setting with high latency links.
58 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
59 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
61 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
62 and output errors in general.
64 ** Changes in behavior
66 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
67 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
68 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
69 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
71 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
72 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
73 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
74 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
75 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
77 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
79 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
80 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
85 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
86 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
88 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
89 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
91 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
92 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
94 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
95 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
97 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
99 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
100 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
101 documentation are provided.
104 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
108 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
109 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
111 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
112 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
113 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendent.
114 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
116 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
117 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
118 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
121 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
122 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
124 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
125 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
127 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
128 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
129 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
130 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
131 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
132 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
146 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
148 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
149 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
150 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
151 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
152 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
153 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
155 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
156 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
157 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
160 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
161 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
164 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
165 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
166 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
169 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
170 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
171 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
173 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
174 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
175 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
177 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
178 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
179 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
180 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
181 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
183 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
184 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
187 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
188 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
190 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
191 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
192 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
194 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
195 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
197 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
198 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
200 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
203 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
204 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
206 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
207 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
208 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
210 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
211 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
215 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
216 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
218 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
219 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
220 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
221 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
222 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
223 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
224 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
225 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
226 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
227 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
228 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
229 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
230 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
231 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
232 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
233 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
234 it suitable for embedded system.
236 ** Changes in behavior
238 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
239 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
241 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
242 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
244 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
245 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
246 will result in the delayed output of lines.
248 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
249 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
250 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
254 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
255 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
256 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
258 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
260 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
261 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
262 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
264 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
265 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
266 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
267 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
269 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
270 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
272 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
273 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
274 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
277 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
281 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
282 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
285 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
286 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
287 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
288 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
290 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
291 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
292 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
294 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
295 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
297 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
299 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
300 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
301 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
303 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
304 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
305 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
307 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
308 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
309 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
312 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
313 from the source, when copying across file systems.
314 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
316 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
317 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
318 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
320 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
321 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
323 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
324 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
325 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
326 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
328 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
329 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
330 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
332 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
333 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
334 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
338 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
339 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
340 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
342 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
343 used to identify the split points.
345 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
346 command line argument through to the output.
348 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
351 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
352 a NUL instead of a white space character.
354 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
355 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
357 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
359 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
360 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
361 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
363 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
364 unique groups with empty lines.
366 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
367 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
369 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
372 ** Changes in behavior
374 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
375 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
376 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
377 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
379 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
380 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
382 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
383 not just the transfer counts.
385 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
387 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
388 as per the documented interface.
392 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
394 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
395 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
396 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
397 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
399 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
400 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
401 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
402 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
404 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
405 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
406 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
408 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
409 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
411 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
412 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
414 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
418 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
421 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
425 numfmt: reformat numbers
429 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
430 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
431 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
433 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
434 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
435 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
437 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
438 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminite amount of time.
442 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
445 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
446 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
449 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
450 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
451 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
453 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
454 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
455 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
457 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
458 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
459 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
461 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
462 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
463 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
465 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
466 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
468 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
469 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
471 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
472 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
473 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
475 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
476 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
477 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
479 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
480 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
481 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
483 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
484 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
485 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
486 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
488 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
489 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
490 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
492 ** Changes in behavior
494 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
495 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
496 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
497 'total' in the target column.
499 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
500 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
501 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
503 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
504 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
506 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
507 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
511 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
512 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
514 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
515 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
517 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
521 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
522 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
523 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
524 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
525 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
526 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
527 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
528 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
529 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
530 for a patched distribution package.
532 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
533 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
535 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
536 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
537 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
538 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
541 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
545 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
547 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
548 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
549 sha384sum and sha512sum.
553 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
554 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
555 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
556 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
559 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
560 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
562 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
563 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
564 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
565 eventually exits nonzero.
567 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
568 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
569 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
570 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
573 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
574 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
577 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
578 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
581 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
582 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
585 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
586 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
587 Before, this would infloop:
588 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
589 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
591 ** Changes in behavior
593 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
597 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
598 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
599 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
600 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
601 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
604 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
605 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
606 format-changing options.
608 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
609 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
610 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
611 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
612 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
616 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
617 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
618 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
619 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
620 are run without following the instructions in README.
622 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
623 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
624 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
625 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
626 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
627 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
628 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
635 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
636 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
637 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
638 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
640 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
641 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
642 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
645 sort -u could read freed memory.
646 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
647 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
652 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
653 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
654 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
655 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
658 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
662 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
663 processes will not intersperse their output.
664 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
666 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
667 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
668 date: invalid date '\260'
669 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
671 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
672 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
673 lines output by df, can work reliably.
674 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
676 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
677 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
678 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
680 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
681 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
682 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
683 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
684 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
685 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
687 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
690 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
691 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
693 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
694 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
695 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
697 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
698 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
699 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
703 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
705 ** Changes in behavior
707 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
708 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
709 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
710 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
711 have any reason to include it here.
715 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
716 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
717 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
719 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
720 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
721 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
724 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
728 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
729 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
730 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
731 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
732 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
733 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
735 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
736 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
737 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
738 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
739 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
740 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
741 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
743 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
746 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
747 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
751 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
752 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
754 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
756 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
758 ** Changes in behavior
760 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
761 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
762 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
764 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
765 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
768 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
772 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
773 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
774 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
775 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
776 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
777 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
778 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
779 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
781 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
782 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
783 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
784 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
785 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
787 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
788 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
790 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
791 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
793 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
794 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
796 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
797 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
799 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
800 additional static suffix to output file names.
802 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
803 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
804 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
806 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
807 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
811 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
812 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
815 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
816 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
817 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
818 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
819 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
820 typically still point to one of the hard links.
822 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
823 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
824 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
825 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
826 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
828 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
829 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
830 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
831 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
835 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
836 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
837 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
839 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
840 instead of causing a usage failure.
842 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
845 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
849 realpath: print resolved file names.
853 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
856 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
857 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
859 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
860 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
861 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
862 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
863 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
864 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
866 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
867 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
868 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
870 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
871 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
874 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
875 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
876 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
877 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
880 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
882 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
883 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
885 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
886 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
887 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
889 ** Changes in behavior
891 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
892 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
893 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
894 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
895 usually-short referent instead.
897 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
898 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
899 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
900 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
903 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
907 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
908 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
909 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
911 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
914 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
919 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
920 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
922 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
923 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
924 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
925 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
927 ** Changes in behavior
929 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
930 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
931 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
935 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
936 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
937 only .tar.xz files is enough.
940 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
944 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
945 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
946 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
948 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
949 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
951 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
952 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
953 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
954 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
955 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
957 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
958 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
959 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
960 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
961 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
962 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
963 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
964 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
966 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
967 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
969 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
970 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
972 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
973 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
975 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
976 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
977 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
979 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
980 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
981 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
982 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
984 ** Changes in behavior
986 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
987 when -v or -c specified.
989 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
990 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
994 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
995 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
996 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
997 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
998 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1000 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1001 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1002 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1004 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1005 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1006 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1007 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1008 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1009 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1010 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1012 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1013 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1014 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1018 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1019 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1021 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1024 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1025 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1027 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1028 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1030 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1031 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1033 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1035 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1039 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1040 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1042 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1045 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1049 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1050 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1052 ** Changes in behavior
1054 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1055 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1056 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1057 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1058 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1059 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1060 resolved for 2.6.39.
1061 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1062 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1063 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1067 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1070 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1074 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1075 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1076 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1078 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1079 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1080 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1082 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1083 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1086 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1089 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1092 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1095 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1100 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1101 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1102 processed portion thereof.
1104 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1105 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1107 ** Changes in behavior
1109 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1110 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1111 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1113 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1114 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1115 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1117 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1118 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1120 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1121 Use --preserve-context instead.
1123 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1126 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1130 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1131 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1132 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1133 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1136 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1137 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1139 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1140 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1141 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1143 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1144 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1146 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1151 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1152 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1153 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1154 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1155 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1156 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1157 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1158 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1160 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1161 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1162 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1164 ** Changes in behavior
1166 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1167 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1168 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1171 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1175 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1176 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1184 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1185 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1187 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1188 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1190 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1191 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1193 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1194 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1195 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1198 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1199 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1201 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1202 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1203 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1205 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1207 ** Changes in behavior
1209 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1210 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1211 to the number of available processors.
1215 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1218 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1222 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1223 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1224 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1225 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1227 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1228 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1229 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1231 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1232 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1234 ** Changes in behavior
1236 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1237 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1239 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1240 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1241 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1242 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1243 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1244 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1246 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1247 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1248 the same way as the others.
1250 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1251 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1254 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1258 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1259 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1260 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1262 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1263 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1265 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1266 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1267 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1269 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1270 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1272 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1275 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1276 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1277 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1279 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1280 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1281 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1282 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1286 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1287 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1289 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1292 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1293 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1295 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1297 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1298 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1299 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1301 ** Changes in behavior
1303 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1304 rather than its aliased target.
1306 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1307 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1308 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1310 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1311 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1312 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1313 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1314 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1315 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1316 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1317 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1319 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1321 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1323 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1324 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1327 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1328 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1329 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1330 control like taskset for example.
1332 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1334 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1335 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1336 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1337 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1338 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1339 includes %C when context information is available.
1341 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1342 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1343 rather than a file system attribute.
1345 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1346 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1347 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1348 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1350 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1351 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1352 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1354 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1355 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1356 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1363 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1366 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1368 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1371 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1372 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1373 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1374 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1376 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1377 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1378 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1382 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1383 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1385 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1386 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1387 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1389 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1390 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1391 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1392 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1393 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1394 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1395 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1396 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1397 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1399 ** Changes in behavior
1401 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1402 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1404 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1405 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1408 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1412 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1413 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1414 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1415 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1419 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1420 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1422 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1423 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1424 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1425 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1427 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1428 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1429 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1436 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1437 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1440 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1441 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1442 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1444 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1445 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1447 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1448 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1449 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1450 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1452 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1453 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1454 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1456 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1457 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1458 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1459 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1461 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1462 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1463 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1465 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1466 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1467 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1468 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1470 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1471 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1474 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1475 processes will not intersperse their output.
1476 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1479 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1483 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1484 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1486 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1489 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1490 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1491 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1492 the presence of the empty string argument.
1493 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1495 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1496 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1497 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1498 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1500 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1503 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1504 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1505 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1507 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1508 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1509 and with a malicious user on the same system
1510 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1511 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1514 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1518 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1519 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1522 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1523 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1524 offending directory and all "contents."
1526 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1527 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1528 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1530 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1531 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1532 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1534 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1535 processes will not intersperse their output.
1536 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1537 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1539 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1540 output the name of the file to stdout.
1541 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1543 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1544 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1545 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1547 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1548 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1551 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1552 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1553 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1555 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1556 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1557 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1558 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1559 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1560 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1562 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1563 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1564 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1565 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1567 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1568 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1570 ** Changes in behavior
1572 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1573 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1574 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1575 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1576 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1578 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1579 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1580 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1581 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1583 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1585 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1586 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1587 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1588 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1589 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1593 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1597 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1598 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1600 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1601 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1603 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1604 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1605 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1607 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1608 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1611 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1615 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1616 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1617 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1619 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1620 to accommodate leap seconds.
1621 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1623 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1624 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1625 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1627 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1629 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1630 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1631 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1633 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1634 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1635 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1636 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1637 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1641 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1642 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1643 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1644 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1646 ** Changes in behavior
1648 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1649 environment variable is set.
1651 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1652 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1653 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1657 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1658 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1659 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1660 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1662 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1663 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1664 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1665 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1669 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1670 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1671 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1673 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1674 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1675 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1676 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1677 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1678 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1679 another improvement:
1681 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1682 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1685 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1689 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1690 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1691 and libraries tested at configure time.
1692 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1694 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1697 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1698 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1700 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1701 printing a summary to stderr.
1702 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1704 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1705 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1706 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1708 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1711 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1712 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1713 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1714 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1716 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1717 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1718 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1719 which is relatively unusual.
1720 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1722 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1723 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1724 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1725 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1726 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1727 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1728 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1732 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1733 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1734 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1735 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1736 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1740 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1741 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1743 ** Changes in behavior
1745 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1746 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1747 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1748 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1749 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1752 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1756 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1757 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1759 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1760 before data copying has started.
1762 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1763 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1765 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1766 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1767 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1768 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1770 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1771 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1772 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1773 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1775 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1780 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1781 for its standard streams.
1783 ** Changes in behavior
1785 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1786 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1787 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1788 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1789 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1790 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1792 ** Deprecated options
1794 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1795 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1799 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1801 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1802 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1803 a btrfs file system.
1805 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1807 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1808 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1810 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1811 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1814 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1818 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1819 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1820 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1821 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1823 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1824 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1825 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1826 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1827 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1832 make check: two tests have been corrected
1836 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1837 inherited from gnulib.
1840 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1844 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1845 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1846 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1847 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1849 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1850 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1852 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1854 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1855 systems without xattr support.
1857 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1858 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1859 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1861 ** Changes in behavior
1863 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1864 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1865 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1866 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1868 ** Improved robustness
1870 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1871 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1872 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1873 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1874 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1875 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1876 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1877 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1878 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1882 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1883 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1885 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1886 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1887 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1888 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1889 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1892 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1896 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1897 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1898 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1902 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1903 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1904 data was read, or on process exit.
1905 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1907 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1908 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1909 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1910 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1912 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1913 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1914 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1915 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1917 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1918 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1920 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1921 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1923 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1924 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1925 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1927 ** Changes in behavior
1929 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1930 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1931 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1933 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1934 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1936 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1937 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1938 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1941 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1945 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1947 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1948 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1949 install: Never copies xattrs
1951 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1952 from overwriting any existing destination file
1954 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1955 mode where this feature is available.
1957 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1958 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1959 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1960 do not modify the destination at all.
1962 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1964 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1968 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1971 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1973 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1974 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1976 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1977 processing the first file name
1979 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1980 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1981 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1982 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1984 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1985 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1987 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1988 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1991 ** Changes in behavior
1993 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1994 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1996 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1997 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1998 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2000 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2001 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2003 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2005 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2006 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2007 is still marked with a '+'.
2010 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2014 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2015 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2019 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2020 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2021 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2022 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2023 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2024 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2026 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2027 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2029 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2030 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2032 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2034 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2035 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2036 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2038 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2039 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2041 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2042 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2043 used to factor large numbers.
2045 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2048 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2050 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2052 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2053 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2055 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2056 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2057 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2058 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2060 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2061 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2062 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2064 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2065 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2069 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2071 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2072 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2074 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2075 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2077 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2079 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2080 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2084 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2085 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2086 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2088 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2090 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2091 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2092 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2094 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2095 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2096 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2098 ** Changes in behavior
2100 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2101 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2104 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2108 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2109 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2110 'futimens' system calls.
2114 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2116 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2117 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2118 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2120 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2121 with no USERNAME argument.
2123 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2124 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2125 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2127 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2128 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2129 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2130 number of fields for some inputs.
2132 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2133 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2135 ** Changes in behavior
2137 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2138 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2141 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2145 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2147 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2148 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2149 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2150 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2152 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2153 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2155 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2156 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2158 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2159 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2161 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2162 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2163 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2164 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2166 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2167 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2168 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2169 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2170 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2171 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2173 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2174 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2176 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2177 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2178 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2180 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2181 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2183 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2184 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2186 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2187 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2188 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2189 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2191 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2192 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2194 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2195 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2197 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2198 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2199 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2203 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2204 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2206 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2207 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2208 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2209 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2213 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2214 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2216 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2218 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2222 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2223 which have negative errno values.
2227 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2231 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2235 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2236 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2239 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2243 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2244 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2245 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2247 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2248 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2249 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2250 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2254 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2255 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2256 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2257 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2260 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2264 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2266 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2267 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2271 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2275 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2276 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2278 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2280 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2282 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2284 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2288 ** Changes in behavior
2290 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2291 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2293 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2294 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2296 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2297 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2298 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2302 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2303 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2304 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2305 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2306 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2307 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2308 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2309 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2310 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2311 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2312 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2314 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2315 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2316 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2319 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2322 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2323 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2324 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2326 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2327 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2328 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2331 ** New build options
2333 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2334 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2335 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2336 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2338 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2339 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2340 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2341 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2342 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2343 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2344 of "make check" fail.
2346 ** Remove deprecated options
2348 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2349 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2350 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2351 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2352 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2354 ** Improved robustness
2356 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2357 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2358 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2359 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2360 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2361 loss of the contents of a/f.
2363 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2364 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2368 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2369 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2370 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2372 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2373 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2374 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2375 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2377 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2378 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2379 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2380 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2381 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2382 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2383 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2384 destination is a symlink.
2386 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2388 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2389 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2391 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2392 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2394 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2396 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2397 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2399 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2400 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2402 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2405 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2406 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2408 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2409 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2411 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2412 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2413 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2414 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2416 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2417 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2418 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2420 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2421 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2422 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2424 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2425 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2426 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2427 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2429 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2430 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2431 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2433 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2434 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2436 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2437 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2439 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2441 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2442 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2443 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2445 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2446 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2448 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2449 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2451 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2452 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2454 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2455 [present in the original version]
2458 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2462 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2464 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2465 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2466 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2468 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2469 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2471 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2475 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2476 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2478 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2479 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2481 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2482 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2484 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2485 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2486 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2487 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2488 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2489 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2491 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2492 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2495 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2496 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2498 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2501 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2502 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2503 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2505 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2506 directory is unreadable.
2508 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2509 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2510 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2512 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2513 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2514 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2515 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2516 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2519 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2520 Before it would print nothing.
2522 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2524 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2525 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2526 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2527 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2528 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2529 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2530 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2531 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2533 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2537 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2538 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2539 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2541 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2542 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2543 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2544 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2547 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2551 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2552 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2553 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2554 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2555 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2556 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2557 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2559 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2560 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2561 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2562 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2563 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2564 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2565 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2566 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2568 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2569 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2570 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2573 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2577 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2578 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2580 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2581 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2582 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2584 ** Improved robustness
2586 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2587 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2588 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2591 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2595 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2596 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2597 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2598 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2599 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2601 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2605 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2608 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2612 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2613 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2614 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2615 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2617 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2618 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2620 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2621 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2622 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2625 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2627 ** Improved robustness
2629 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2630 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2632 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2633 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2634 or NFS-mounted partition.
2636 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2637 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2641 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2642 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2643 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2644 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2645 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2646 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2648 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2649 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2651 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2652 or neglect to report file removal.
2654 For the "groups" command:
2656 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2657 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2659 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2661 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2663 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2667 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2668 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2671 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2673 ** Changes in behavior
2675 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2676 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2677 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2678 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2680 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2681 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2682 a final './' or '../' component.
2684 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2685 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2686 this only for pipes.
2688 ** Infrastructure changes
2690 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2691 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2692 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2693 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2697 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2698 name is "." or "..".
2700 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2701 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2702 dirent.d_type support.
2704 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2705 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2707 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2708 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2709 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2710 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2713 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2715 ** Changes in behavior
2717 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2721 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2722 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2726 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2727 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2728 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2730 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2731 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2733 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2734 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2736 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2738 ** Improved robustness
2740 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2741 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2742 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2744 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2745 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2748 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2749 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2751 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2752 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2754 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2755 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2757 ** Changes in behavior
2759 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2760 where the two are distinct.
2762 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2763 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2764 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2765 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2766 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2767 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2768 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2769 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2770 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2771 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2772 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2773 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2774 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2775 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2776 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2777 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2778 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2780 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2781 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2782 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2784 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2785 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2786 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2787 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2790 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2791 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2795 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2796 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2797 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2798 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2800 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2801 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2802 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2804 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2805 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2806 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2807 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2808 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2811 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2812 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2814 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2815 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2816 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2817 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2819 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2820 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2821 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2823 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2824 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2825 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2826 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2828 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2829 and sticky) with the -m option.
2831 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2832 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2833 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2834 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2835 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2837 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2838 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2840 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2844 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2845 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2846 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2847 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2849 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2851 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2853 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2854 silently ignoring one of them.
2856 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2857 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2858 containing this change was 5.92.
2860 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2861 automatically newline terminated.
2863 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2864 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2865 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2866 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2869 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2870 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2871 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2874 ** Scheduled for removal
2876 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2877 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2879 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2880 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2881 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2882 command to unlink a directory.
2884 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2885 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2886 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2887 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2891 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2892 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2893 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2894 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2895 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2896 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2900 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2901 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2903 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2905 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2906 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2907 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2909 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2910 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2913 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2914 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2916 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2917 list directories before files.
2919 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2920 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2921 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2922 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2925 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2927 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2929 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2930 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2931 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2933 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2934 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2938 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2939 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2940 usually printing nothing.
2942 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2944 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2945 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2946 them with hard-linked directories.
2948 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2949 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2950 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2952 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2953 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2954 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2956 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2959 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2960 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2962 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2963 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2965 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2966 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2968 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2969 all command-line arguments.
2971 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2973 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2975 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2976 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2978 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2980 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2981 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2982 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2983 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2984 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2986 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2987 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2989 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2990 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2991 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2992 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2994 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2996 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3000 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3001 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3003 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3004 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3006 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3007 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3009 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3010 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3012 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3013 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3015 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3017 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3018 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3019 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3022 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3024 ** Build-related bug fixes
3026 installing .mo files would fail
3029 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3033 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3035 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3038 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3042 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3043 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3047 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3049 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3050 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3052 ** Deprecated options
3054 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3055 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3057 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3061 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3063 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3064 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3065 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3066 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3068 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3071 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3077 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3082 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3084 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3086 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3087 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3088 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3090 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3091 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3092 problematic usages. These include:
3094 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3095 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3096 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3097 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3098 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3099 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3100 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3101 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3102 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3104 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3105 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3107 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3108 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3109 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3110 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3112 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3113 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3114 between binary and text files.
3116 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3120 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3124 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3125 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3127 head tac tail tee tr
3128 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3130 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3131 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3133 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3134 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3135 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3137 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3139 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3141 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3142 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3143 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3147 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3149 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3150 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3152 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3153 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3154 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3158 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3159 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3163 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3164 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3165 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3169 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3170 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3174 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3176 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3178 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3182 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3183 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3184 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3186 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3187 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3188 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3189 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3190 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3192 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3196 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3197 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3198 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3200 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3202 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3203 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3204 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3205 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3207 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3209 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3210 rather than silently wrapping around.
3212 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3213 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3215 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3216 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3218 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3219 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3220 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3221 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3223 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3225 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3227 ** Improved robustness
3229 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3230 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3231 no matter how large the result.
3233 ** Improved portability
3235 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3236 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3238 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3240 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3241 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3242 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3244 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3245 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3249 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3250 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3252 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3254 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3255 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3256 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3257 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3259 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3260 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3262 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3263 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3264 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3266 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3268 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3269 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3271 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3272 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3274 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3276 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3277 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3279 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3280 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3282 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3283 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3284 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3286 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3288 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3290 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3294 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3296 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3297 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3298 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3300 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3301 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3303 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3304 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3305 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3307 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3308 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3310 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3311 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3312 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3313 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3315 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3316 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3318 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3319 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3320 the file system does not support it.
3322 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3324 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3325 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3327 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3329 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3330 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3332 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3333 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3334 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3335 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3337 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3338 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3341 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3342 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3343 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3344 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3346 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3347 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3348 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3349 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3351 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3352 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3354 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3356 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3357 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3358 reporting incorrect results.
3362 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3363 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3365 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3368 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3370 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3371 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3373 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3374 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3376 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3379 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3380 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3381 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3382 the file name does not look like a page range.
3384 printf has several changes:
3386 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3387 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3389 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3390 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3391 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3393 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3394 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3397 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3398 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3400 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3401 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3403 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3405 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3406 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3408 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3410 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3412 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3413 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3414 when first encountering the directory.
3418 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3419 output; POSIX requires this.
3421 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3422 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3424 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3426 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3427 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3429 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3430 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3432 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3433 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3434 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3435 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3436 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3437 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3438 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3440 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3441 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3442 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3444 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3445 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3447 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3449 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3451 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3452 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3453 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3454 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3456 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3460 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3461 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3462 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3463 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3464 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3466 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3467 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3468 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3470 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3471 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3473 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3474 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3476 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3477 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3478 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3479 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3480 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3482 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3483 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3485 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3486 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3488 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3490 nocreat do not create the output file
3491 excl fail if the output file already exists
3492 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3493 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3495 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3497 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3498 direct use direct I/O for data
3499 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3500 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3501 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3502 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3503 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3505 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3507 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3508 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3511 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3512 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3513 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3514 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3515 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3516 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3518 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3519 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3521 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3524 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3526 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3528 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3529 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3531 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3532 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3533 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3535 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3536 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3537 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3539 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3541 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3542 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3544 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3545 for compatibility with bash.
3547 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3549 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3550 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3551 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3552 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3554 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3555 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3557 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3558 ls supports TABSIZE.
3559 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3560 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3561 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3563 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3566 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3568 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3569 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3570 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3571 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3572 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3573 an offset, not as a file name.
3575 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3576 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3578 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3579 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3581 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3582 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3584 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3585 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3586 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3588 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3589 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3591 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3592 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3596 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3598 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3600 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3604 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3605 or more arguments between partitions.
3607 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3608 holes in the destination.
3610 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3611 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3612 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3613 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3614 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3615 terminates immediately.
3617 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3619 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3621 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3622 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3623 not the empty string.
3625 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3626 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3630 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3631 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3632 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3635 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3642 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3646 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3647 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3649 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3650 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3652 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3653 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3654 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3657 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3661 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3662 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3664 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3665 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3667 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3668 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3669 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3671 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3673 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3676 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3678 ** Configuration option
3680 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3681 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3685 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3686 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3690 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3691 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3692 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3695 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3696 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3697 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3698 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3699 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3700 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3701 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3704 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3708 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3709 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3710 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3712 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3713 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3715 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3717 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3718 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3719 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3720 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3722 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3724 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3725 not just the ones that reference directories
3727 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3728 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3730 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3731 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3732 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3734 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3735 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3736 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3737 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3738 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3739 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3741 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3746 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3747 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3749 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3751 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3753 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3755 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3756 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3758 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3759 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3761 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3763 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3767 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3769 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3771 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3772 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3773 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3774 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3775 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3777 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3778 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3780 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3781 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3783 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3784 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3786 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3787 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3788 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3792 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3793 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3794 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3795 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3796 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3797 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3798 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3799 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3800 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3801 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3802 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3803 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3804 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3805 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3807 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3809 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3810 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3812 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3814 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3816 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3817 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3819 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3821 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3822 without a trailing newline.
3824 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3825 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3827 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3830 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3834 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3836 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3838 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3839 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3840 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3841 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3843 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3845 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3846 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3847 be printed without leading spaces.
3849 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3850 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3855 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3856 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3857 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3859 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3861 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3862 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3864 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3865 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3867 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3868 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3870 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3872 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3874 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3876 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3877 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3879 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3881 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3883 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3884 byte offsets are specified.
3887 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3890 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3893 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3894 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3895 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3896 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3897 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3898 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3899 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3900 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3901 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3902 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3903 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3904 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3905 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3906 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3907 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3908 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3909 directory where M has write access.
3910 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3911 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3912 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3915 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3916 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3917 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3918 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3919 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3920 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3921 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3922 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3923 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3924 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3925 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3926 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3927 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3928 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3929 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3930 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3931 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3932 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3933 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3934 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3935 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3936 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3937 appeared one additional time.
3939 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3940 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3941 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3942 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3945 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3946 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3947 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3948 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3949 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3950 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3951 if there were more than 338.
3953 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3954 - false --help now exits nonzero
3957 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3958 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3959 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3960 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3963 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3964 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3965 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3966 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3967 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3970 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3971 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3972 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3973 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3974 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3975 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3976 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3979 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3980 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3981 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3982 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3983 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3984 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3986 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3987 under certain unusual conditions
3988 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3989 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3992 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3993 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3994 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3995 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3996 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3997 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3998 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3999 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4000 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4001 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4002 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4003 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4004 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4005 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4006 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4007 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4010 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4011 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4014 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4015 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4016 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4017 involving hard-linked directories
4018 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4019 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4020 character-special and block files
4023 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4024 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4025 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4026 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4027 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4028 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4029 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4030 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4031 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4033 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4034 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4035 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4036 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4037 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4038 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4039 specified on the command line.
4040 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4041 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4042 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4043 the first file untouched.
4044 * readlink: new program
4045 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4046 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4047 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4048 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4049 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4050 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4053 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4054 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4055 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4056 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4057 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4058 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4059 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4060 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4061 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4062 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4063 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4064 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4066 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4067 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4068 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4070 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4071 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4072 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4073 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4074 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4075 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4076 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4077 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4080 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4081 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4084 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4085 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4086 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4087 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4088 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4089 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4090 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4093 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4094 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4096 ========================================================================
4097 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4098 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4101 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4103 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4104 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4105 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4106 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4107 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4108 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4109 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4110 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4111 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4112 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4113 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4114 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4116 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4117 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4118 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4119 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4121 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4124 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4126 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4127 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4128 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4129 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4130 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4131 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4132 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4135 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4136 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4137 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4138 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4139 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4140 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4141 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4142 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4143 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4144 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4145 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4146 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4147 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4148 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4149 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4150 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4152 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4153 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4155 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4156 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4157 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4158 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4159 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4160 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4162 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4163 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4164 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4165 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4166 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4167 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4168 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4170 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4171 the source files in the following example:
4172 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4173 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4174 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4175 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4176 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4177 links between source files with --preserve=links
4178 * cp accepts new options:
4179 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4180 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4181 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4182 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4183 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4184 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4185 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4186 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4187 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4189 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4190 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4191 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4192 even though it's older than dest.
4193 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4194 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4195 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4196 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4197 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4199 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4200 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4201 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4202 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4203 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4204 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4205 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4207 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4208 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4209 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4211 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4212 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4213 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4214 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4215 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4216 This is the default.
4218 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4219 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4220 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4221 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4222 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4224 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4227 ========================================================================
4228 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4229 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4232 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4233 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4235 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4236 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4237 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4238 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4239 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4241 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4242 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4243 that specifies a non-directory
4246 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4247 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4248 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4249 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4250 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4251 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4252 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4253 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4254 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4255 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4256 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4257 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4258 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4259 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4260 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4261 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4262 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4263 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4264 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4265 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4266 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4267 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4268 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4269 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4271 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4272 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4273 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4275 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4277 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4278 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4280 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4281 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4282 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4283 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4284 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4286 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4287 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4288 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4289 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4290 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4292 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4294 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4295 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4296 * still more portability fixes
4297 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4298 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4300 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4302 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4304 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4306 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4307 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4308 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4309 there is any time remaining
4310 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4312 ========================================================================
4313 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4314 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4316 This package began as the union of the following:
4317 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4319 ========================================================================
4321 Copyright (C) 2001-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4323 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4324 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4325 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4326 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4327 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4328 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.