1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
8 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
9 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
10 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
11 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
12 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
13 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
14 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
16 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
17 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
18 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
19 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
20 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
22 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
23 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
25 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
26 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
28 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
29 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
31 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
32 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
34 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
35 additional static suffix to output file names.
37 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
38 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
39 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
41 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
42 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
46 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
47 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
50 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
51 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
52 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
53 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
54 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
55 typically still point to one of the hard links.
57 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
58 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
59 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
60 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
61 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
63 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
64 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
65 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
66 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
70 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
71 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
72 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
74 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
75 instead of causing a usage failure.
77 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
80 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
84 realpath: print resolved file names.
88 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
89 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
91 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
94 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
95 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
96 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
97 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
98 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
99 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
101 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
102 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
103 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
105 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
106 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
109 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
110 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
111 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
112 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
115 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
117 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
120 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
121 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
122 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
124 ** Changes in behavior
126 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
127 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
128 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
129 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
130 usually-short referent instead.
132 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
133 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
134 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
135 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
138 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
142 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
143 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
144 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
146 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
149 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
154 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
155 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
157 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
158 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
159 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
160 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
162 ** Changes in behavior
164 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
165 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
166 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
170 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
171 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
172 only .tar.xz files is enough.
175 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
179 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
180 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
181 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
183 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
184 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
186 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
187 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
188 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
189 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
190 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
192 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
193 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
194 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
195 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
196 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
197 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
198 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
199 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
201 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
202 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
204 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
205 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
207 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
208 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
210 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
211 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
212 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
214 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
215 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
216 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
219 ** Changes in behavior
221 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
222 when -v or -c specified.
224 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
225 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
229 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
230 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
231 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
232 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
233 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
235 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
236 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
237 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
239 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
240 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
241 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
242 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
243 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
244 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
245 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
247 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
248 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
249 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
253 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
254 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
256 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
259 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
260 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
262 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
263 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
265 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
266 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
268 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
270 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
274 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
275 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
277 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
280 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
284 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
285 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
287 ** Changes in behavior
289 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
290 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
291 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
292 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
293 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
294 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
296 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
297 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
298 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
302 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
305 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
309 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
310 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
313 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
314 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
317 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
318 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
321 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
322 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
324 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
327 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
328 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
330 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
335 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
336 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
337 processed portion thereof.
339 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
340 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
342 ** Changes in behavior
344 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
345 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
346 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
348 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
349 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
350 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
352 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
353 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
355 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
356 Use --preserve-context instead.
358 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
365 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
366 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
367 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
368 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
371 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
372 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
374 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
375 reject file names invalid for that file system.
377 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
378 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
382 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
383 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
384 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
385 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
386 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
387 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
388 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
389 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
391 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
392 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
393 the same number of fields are output for each line.
395 ** Changes in behavior
397 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
398 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
399 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
402 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
406 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
407 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
408 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
411 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
415 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
416 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
418 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
419 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
421 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
422 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
424 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
425 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
426 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
429 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
430 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
432 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
433 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
434 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
436 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
438 ** Changes in behavior
440 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
441 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
442 to the number of available processors.
446 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
449 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
453 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
454 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
455 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
456 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
458 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
459 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
460 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
462 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
463 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
465 ** Changes in behavior
467 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
468 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
470 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
471 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
472 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
473 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
474 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
475 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
477 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
478 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
479 the same way as the others.
482 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
486 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
487 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
488 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
490 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
491 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
493 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
494 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
495 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
497 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
498 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
500 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
503 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
504 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
505 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
507 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
508 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
509 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
510 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
514 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
515 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
517 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
520 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
521 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
523 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
525 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
526 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
527 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
529 ** Changes in behavior
531 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
532 rather than its aliased target.
534 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
535 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
536 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
538 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
539 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
540 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
541 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
542 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
543 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
544 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
545 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
547 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
549 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
551 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
552 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
555 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
556 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
557 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
558 control like taskset for example.
560 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
562 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
563 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
564 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
565 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
566 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
567 includes %C when context information is available.
569 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
570 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
571 rather than a file system attribute.
573 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
574 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
575 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
576 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
578 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
579 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
580 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
582 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
583 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
584 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
587 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
591 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
594 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
596 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
597 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
599 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
600 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
601 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
602 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
604 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
605 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
610 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
611 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
613 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
614 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
615 duration after the initial signal was sent.
617 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
618 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
619 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
620 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
621 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
622 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
623 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
624 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
625 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
627 ** Changes in behavior
629 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
630 sequence when it would be a no-op.
632 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
633 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
636 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
640 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
641 of available processors, which may not have been the case
642 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
647 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
648 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
650 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
651 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
652 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
653 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
655 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
656 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
657 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
660 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
664 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
665 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
666 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
668 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
669 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
670 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
672 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
675 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
676 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
677 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
678 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
680 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
681 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
684 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
685 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
686 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
689 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
690 renamed-aside and then recreated.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
693 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
694 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
695 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
698 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
699 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
700 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
702 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
703 processes will not intersperse their output.
704 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
707 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
711 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
714 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
717 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
718 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
719 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
720 the presence of the empty string argument.
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
723 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
724 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
725 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
726 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
728 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
731 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
732 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
733 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
735 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
736 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
737 and with a malicious user on the same system
738 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
742 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
746 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
747 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
750 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
751 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
752 offending directory and all "contents."
754 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
755 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
756 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
758 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
759 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
760 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
762 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
763 processes will not intersperse their output.
764 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
765 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
767 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
768 output the name of the file to stdout.
769 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
771 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
772 call fails with errno == EACCES.
773 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
775 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
776 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
779 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
780 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
781 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
783 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
784 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
785 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
786 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
787 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
788 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
790 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
791 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
792 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
793 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
795 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
796 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
798 ** Changes in behavior
800 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
801 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
802 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
803 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
804 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
806 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
807 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
808 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
809 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
811 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
813 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
814 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
815 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
816 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
817 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
821 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
825 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
826 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
828 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
829 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
831 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
832 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
833 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
835 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
836 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
839 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
843 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
844 when the source file doesn't have write access.
845 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
847 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
848 to accommodate leap seconds.
849 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
851 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
852 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
853 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
855 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
857 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
858 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
859 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
861 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
862 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
863 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
864 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
865 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
869 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
870 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
871 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
872 directory or a symlink to a directory.
874 ** Changes in behavior
876 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
877 environment variable is set.
879 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
880 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
881 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
885 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
886 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
887 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
888 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
890 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
891 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
892 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
893 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
897 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
898 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
899 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
901 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
902 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
903 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
904 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
905 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
906 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
909 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
910 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
913 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
917 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
918 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
919 and libraries tested at configure time.
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
922 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
923 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
925 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
928 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
929 printing a summary to stderr.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
932 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
933 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
934 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
936 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
939 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
940 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
941 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
942 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
944 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
945 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
946 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
947 which is relatively unusual.
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
950 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
951 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
952 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
953 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
954 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
955 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
956 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
960 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
961 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
962 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
963 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
964 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
968 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
969 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
971 ** Changes in behavior
973 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
974 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
975 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
976 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
977 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
980 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
984 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
985 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
987 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
988 before data copying has started.
990 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
991 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
993 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
994 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
995 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
996 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
998 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
999 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1000 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1001 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1003 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1008 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1009 for its standard streams.
1011 ** Changes in behavior
1013 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1014 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1015 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1016 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1017 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1018 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1020 ** Deprecated options
1022 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1023 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1027 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1029 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1030 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1031 a btrfs file system.
1033 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1035 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1036 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1038 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1039 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1042 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1046 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1047 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1048 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1049 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1051 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1052 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1053 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1054 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1055 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1060 make check: two tests have been corrected
1064 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1065 inherited from gnulib.
1068 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1072 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1073 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1074 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1075 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1077 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1078 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1080 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1082 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1083 systems without xattr support.
1085 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1086 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1087 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1089 ** Changes in behavior
1091 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1092 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1093 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1094 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1096 ** Improved robustness
1098 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1099 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1100 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1101 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1102 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1103 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1104 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1105 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1106 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1110 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1111 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1113 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1114 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1115 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1116 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1117 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1120 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1124 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1125 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1126 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1130 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1131 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1132 data was read, or on process exit.
1133 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1135 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1136 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1137 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1140 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1141 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1142 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1145 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1146 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1148 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1149 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1151 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1152 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1153 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1155 ** Changes in behavior
1157 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1158 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1159 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1161 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1162 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1164 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1165 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1166 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1169 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1173 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1175 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1176 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1177 install: Never copies xattrs
1179 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1180 from overwriting any existing destination file
1182 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1183 mode where this feature is available.
1185 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1186 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1187 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1188 do not modify the destination at all.
1190 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1192 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1196 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1197 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1199 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1201 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1202 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1204 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1205 processing the first file name
1207 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1208 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1209 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1210 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1212 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1213 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1215 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1216 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1219 ** Changes in behavior
1221 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1222 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1224 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1225 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1226 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1228 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1229 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1231 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1233 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1234 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1235 is still marked with a '+'.
1238 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1242 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1243 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1247 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1248 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1249 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1250 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1251 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1252 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1254 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1255 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1257 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1258 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1260 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1262 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1263 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1264 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1266 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1267 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1269 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1270 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1271 used to factor large numbers.
1273 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1276 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1278 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1280 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1281 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1283 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1284 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1285 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1286 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1288 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1289 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1290 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1292 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1293 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1297 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1299 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1300 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1302 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1303 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1305 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1307 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1308 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1312 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1313 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1314 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1316 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1318 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1319 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1320 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1322 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1323 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1324 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1326 ** Changes in behavior
1328 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1329 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1332 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1336 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1337 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1338 'futimens' system calls.
1342 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1344 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1345 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1346 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1348 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1349 with no USERNAME argument.
1351 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1352 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1353 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1355 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1356 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1357 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1358 number of fields for some inputs.
1360 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1361 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1363 ** Changes in behavior
1365 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1366 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1369 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1373 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1375 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1376 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1377 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1378 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1380 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1381 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1383 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1384 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1386 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1387 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1389 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1390 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1391 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1394 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1395 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1396 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1397 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1398 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1399 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1401 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1402 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1404 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1405 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1406 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1408 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1409 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1411 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1412 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1414 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1415 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1416 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1417 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1419 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1420 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1422 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1423 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1425 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1426 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1427 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1431 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1432 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1434 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1435 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1436 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1437 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1441 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1442 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1444 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1446 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1450 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1451 which have negative errno values.
1455 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1459 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1463 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1464 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1467 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1471 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1472 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1475 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1476 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1477 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1478 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1482 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1483 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1484 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1485 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1488 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1492 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1494 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1495 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1499 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1503 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1504 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1506 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1508 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1510 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1512 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1516 ** Changes in behavior
1518 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1519 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1521 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1522 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1524 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1525 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1526 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1530 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1531 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1532 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1533 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1534 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1535 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1536 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1537 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1538 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1539 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1540 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1542 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1543 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1544 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1547 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1550 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1551 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1552 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1554 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1555 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1556 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1559 ** New build options
1561 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1562 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1563 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1564 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1566 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1567 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1568 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1569 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1570 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1571 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1572 of "make check" fail.
1574 ** Remove deprecated options
1576 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1577 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1578 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1579 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1580 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1582 ** Improved robustness
1584 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1585 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1586 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1587 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1588 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1589 loss of the contents of a/f.
1591 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1592 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1596 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1597 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1598 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1600 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1601 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1602 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1603 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1605 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1606 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1607 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1608 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1609 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1610 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1611 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1612 destination is a symlink.
1614 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1616 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1617 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1619 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1620 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1622 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1624 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1625 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1627 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1628 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1630 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1633 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1634 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1636 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1637 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1639 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1640 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1641 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1642 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1644 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1645 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1646 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1648 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1649 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1650 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1652 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1653 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1654 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1655 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1657 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1658 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1659 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1661 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1662 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1664 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1665 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1667 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1669 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1670 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1671 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1673 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1674 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1676 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1677 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1679 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1680 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1682 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1683 [present in the original version]
1686 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1690 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1692 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1693 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1694 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1696 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1697 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1699 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1703 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1704 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1706 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1707 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1709 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1710 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1712 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1713 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1714 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1715 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1716 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1717 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1719 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1720 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1723 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1724 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1726 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1729 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1730 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1731 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1733 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1734 directory is unreadable.
1736 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1737 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1738 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1740 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1741 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1742 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1743 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1744 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1747 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1748 Before it would print nothing.
1750 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1752 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1753 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1754 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1755 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1756 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1757 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1758 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1759 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1761 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1765 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1766 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1767 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1769 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1770 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1771 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1772 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1775 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1779 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1780 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1781 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1782 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1783 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1784 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1785 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1787 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1788 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1789 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1790 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1791 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1792 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1793 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1794 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1796 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1797 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1798 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1801 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1805 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1806 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1808 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1809 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1810 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1812 ** Improved robustness
1814 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1815 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1816 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1819 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1823 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1824 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1825 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1826 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1827 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1829 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1833 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1836 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1840 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1841 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1842 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1843 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1845 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1846 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1848 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1849 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1850 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1853 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1855 ** Improved robustness
1857 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1858 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1860 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1861 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1862 or NFS-mounted partition.
1864 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1865 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1869 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1870 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1871 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1872 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1873 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1874 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1876 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1877 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1879 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1880 or neglect to report file removal.
1882 For the "groups" command:
1884 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1885 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1887 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1889 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1891 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1895 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1896 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1899 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1901 ** Changes in behavior
1903 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1904 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1905 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1906 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1908 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1909 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1910 a final './' or '../' component.
1912 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1913 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1914 this only for pipes.
1916 ** Infrastructure changes
1918 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1919 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1920 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1921 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1925 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1926 name is "." or "..".
1928 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1929 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1930 dirent.d_type support.
1932 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1933 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1935 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1936 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1937 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1938 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1941 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1943 ** Changes in behavior
1945 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1949 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1950 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1954 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1955 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1956 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1958 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1959 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1961 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1962 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1964 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1966 ** Improved robustness
1968 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1969 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1970 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1972 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1973 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1976 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1977 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1979 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1980 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1982 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1983 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1985 ** Changes in behavior
1987 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1988 where the two are distinct.
1990 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1991 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1992 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1993 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1994 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1995 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1996 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1997 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1998 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1999 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2000 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2001 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2002 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2003 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2004 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2005 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2006 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2008 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2009 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2010 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2012 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2013 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2014 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2015 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2018 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2019 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2023 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2024 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2025 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2026 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2028 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2029 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2030 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2032 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2033 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2034 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2035 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2036 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2039 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2040 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2042 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2043 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2044 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2045 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2047 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2048 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2049 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2051 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2052 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2053 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2054 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2056 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2057 and sticky) with the -m option.
2059 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2060 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2061 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2062 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2063 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2065 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2066 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2068 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2072 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2073 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2074 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2075 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2077 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2079 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2081 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2082 silently ignoring one of them.
2084 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2085 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2086 containing this change was 5.92.
2088 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2089 automatically newline terminated.
2091 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2092 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2093 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2094 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2097 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2098 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2099 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2102 ** Scheduled for removal
2104 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2105 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2107 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2108 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2109 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2110 command to unlink a directory.
2112 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2113 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2114 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2115 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2119 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2120 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2121 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2122 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2123 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2124 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2128 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2129 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2131 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2133 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2134 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2135 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2137 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2138 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2141 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2142 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2144 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2145 list directories before files.
2147 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2148 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2149 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2150 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2153 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2155 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2157 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2158 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2159 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2161 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2162 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2166 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2167 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2168 usually printing nothing.
2170 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2172 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2173 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2174 them with hard-linked directories.
2176 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2177 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2178 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2180 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2181 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2182 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2184 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2187 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2188 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2190 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2191 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2193 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2194 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2196 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2197 all command-line arguments.
2199 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2201 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2203 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2204 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2206 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2208 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2209 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2210 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2211 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2212 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2214 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2215 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2217 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2218 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2219 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2220 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2222 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2224 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2228 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2229 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2231 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2232 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2234 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2235 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2237 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2238 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2240 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2241 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2243 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2245 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2246 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2247 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2250 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2252 ** Build-related bug fixes
2254 installing .mo files would fail
2257 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2261 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2263 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2266 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2270 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2271 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2275 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2277 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2278 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2280 ** Deprecated options
2282 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2283 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2285 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2289 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2291 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2292 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2293 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2294 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2296 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2299 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2305 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2310 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2312 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2314 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2315 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2316 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2318 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2319 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2320 problematic usages. These include:
2322 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2323 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2324 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2325 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2326 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2327 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2328 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2329 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2330 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2332 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2333 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2335 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2336 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2337 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2338 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2340 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2341 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2342 between binary and text files.
2344 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2348 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2352 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2353 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2355 head tac tail tee tr
2356 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2358 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2359 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2361 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2362 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2363 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2365 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2367 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2369 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2370 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2371 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2375 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2377 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2378 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2380 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2381 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2382 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2386 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2387 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2391 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2392 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2393 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2397 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2398 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2402 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2404 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2406 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2410 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2411 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2412 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2414 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2415 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2416 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2417 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2418 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2420 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2424 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2425 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2426 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2428 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2430 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2431 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2432 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2433 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2435 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2437 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2438 rather than silently wrapping around.
2440 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2441 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2443 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2444 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2446 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2447 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2448 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2449 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2451 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2453 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2455 ** Improved robustness
2457 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2458 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2459 no matter how large the result.
2461 ** Improved portability
2463 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2464 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2466 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2468 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2469 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2470 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2472 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2473 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2477 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2478 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2480 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2482 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2483 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2484 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2485 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2487 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2488 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2490 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2491 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2492 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2494 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2496 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2497 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2499 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2500 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2502 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2504 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2505 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2507 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2508 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2510 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2511 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2512 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2514 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2516 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2518 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2522 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2524 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2525 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2526 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2528 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2529 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2531 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2532 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2533 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2535 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2536 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2538 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2539 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2540 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2541 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2543 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2544 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2546 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2547 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2548 the file system does not support it.
2550 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2552 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2553 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2555 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2557 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2558 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2560 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2561 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2562 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2563 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2565 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2566 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2569 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2570 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2571 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2572 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2574 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2575 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2576 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2577 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2579 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2580 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2582 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2584 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2585 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2586 reporting incorrect results.
2590 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2591 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2593 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2596 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2598 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2599 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2601 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2602 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2604 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2607 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2608 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2609 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2610 the file name does not look like a page range.
2612 printf has several changes:
2614 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2615 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2617 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2618 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2619 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2621 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2622 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2625 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2626 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2628 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2629 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2631 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2633 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2634 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2636 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2638 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2640 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2641 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2642 when first encountering the directory.
2646 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2647 output; POSIX requires this.
2649 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2650 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2652 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2654 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2655 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2657 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2658 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2660 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2661 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2662 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2663 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2664 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2665 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2666 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2668 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2669 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2670 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2672 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2673 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2675 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2677 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2679 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2680 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2681 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2682 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2684 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2688 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2689 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2690 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2691 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2692 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2694 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2695 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2696 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2698 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2699 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2701 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2702 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2704 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2705 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2706 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2707 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2708 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2710 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2711 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2713 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2714 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2716 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2718 nocreat do not create the output file
2719 excl fail if the output file already exists
2720 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2721 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2723 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2725 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2726 direct use direct I/O for data
2727 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2728 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2729 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2730 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2731 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2733 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2735 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2736 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2739 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2740 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2741 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2742 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2743 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2744 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2746 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2747 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2749 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2752 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2754 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2756 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2757 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2759 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2760 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2761 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2763 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2764 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2765 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2767 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2769 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2770 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2772 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2773 for compatibility with bash.
2775 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2777 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2778 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2779 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2780 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2782 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2783 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2785 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2786 ls supports TABSIZE.
2787 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2788 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2789 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2791 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2794 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2796 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2797 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2798 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2799 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2800 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2801 an offset, not as a file name.
2803 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2804 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2806 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2807 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2809 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2810 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2812 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2813 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2814 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2816 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2817 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2819 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2820 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2824 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2826 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2828 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2832 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2833 or more arguments between partitions.
2835 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2836 holes in the destination.
2838 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2839 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2840 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2841 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2842 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2843 terminates immediately.
2845 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2847 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2849 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2850 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2851 not the empty string.
2853 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2854 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2858 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2859 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2860 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2863 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2870 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2874 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2875 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2877 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2878 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2880 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2881 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2882 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2885 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2889 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2890 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2892 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2893 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2895 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2896 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2897 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2899 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2901 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2904 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2906 ** Configuration option
2908 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2909 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2913 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2914 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2918 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2919 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2920 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2923 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2924 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2925 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2926 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2927 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2928 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2929 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2932 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2936 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2937 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2938 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2940 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2941 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2943 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2945 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2946 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2947 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2948 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2950 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2952 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2953 not just the ones that reference directories
2955 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2956 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2958 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2959 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2960 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2962 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2963 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2964 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2965 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2966 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2967 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2969 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2974 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2975 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2977 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2979 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2981 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2983 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2984 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2986 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2987 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2989 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2991 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2995 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2997 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2999 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3000 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3001 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3002 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3003 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3005 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3006 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3008 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3009 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3011 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3012 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3014 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3015 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3016 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3020 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3021 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3022 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3023 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3024 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3025 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3026 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3027 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3028 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3029 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3030 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3031 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3032 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3033 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3035 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3037 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3038 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3040 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3042 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3044 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3045 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3047 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3049 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3050 without a trailing newline.
3052 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3053 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3055 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3058 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3062 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3064 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3066 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3067 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3068 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3069 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3071 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3073 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3074 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3075 be printed without leading spaces.
3077 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3078 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3083 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3084 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3085 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3087 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3089 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3090 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3092 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3093 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3095 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3096 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3098 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3100 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3102 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3104 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3105 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3107 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3109 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3111 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3112 byte offsets are specified.
3115 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3118 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3121 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3122 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3123 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3124 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3125 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3126 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3127 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3128 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3129 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3130 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3131 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3132 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3133 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3134 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3135 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3136 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3137 directory where M has write access.
3138 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3139 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3140 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3143 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3144 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3145 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3146 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3147 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3148 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3149 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3150 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3151 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3152 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3153 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3154 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3155 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3156 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3157 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3158 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3159 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3160 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3161 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3162 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3163 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3164 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3165 appeared one additional time.
3167 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3168 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3169 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3170 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3173 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3174 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3175 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3176 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3177 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3178 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3179 if there were more than 338.
3181 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3182 - false --help now exits nonzero
3185 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3186 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3187 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3188 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3191 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3192 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3193 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3194 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3195 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3198 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3199 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3200 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3201 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3202 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3203 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3204 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3207 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3208 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3209 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3210 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3211 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3212 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3214 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3215 under certain unusual conditions
3216 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3217 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3220 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3221 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3222 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3223 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3224 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3225 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3226 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3227 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3228 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3229 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3230 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3231 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3232 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3233 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3234 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3235 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3238 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3239 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3242 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3243 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3244 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3245 involving hard-linked directories
3246 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3247 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3248 character-special and block files
3251 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3252 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3253 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3254 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3255 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3256 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3257 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3258 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3259 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3261 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3262 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3263 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3264 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3265 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3266 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3267 specified on the command line.
3268 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3269 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3270 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3271 the first file untouched.
3272 * readlink: new program
3273 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3274 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3275 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3276 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3277 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3278 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3281 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3282 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3283 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3284 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3285 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3286 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3287 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3288 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3289 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3290 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3291 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3292 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3294 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3295 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3296 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3298 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3299 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3300 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3301 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3302 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3303 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3304 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3305 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3308 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3309 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3312 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3313 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3314 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3315 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3316 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3317 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3318 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3321 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3322 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3324 ========================================================================
3325 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3326 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3329 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3331 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3332 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3333 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3334 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3335 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3336 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3337 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3338 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3339 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3340 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3341 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3342 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3344 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3345 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3346 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3347 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3349 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3352 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3354 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3355 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3356 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3357 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3358 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3359 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3360 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3363 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3364 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3365 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3366 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3367 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3368 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3369 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3370 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3371 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3372 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3373 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3374 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3375 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3376 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3377 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3378 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3380 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3381 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3383 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3384 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3385 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3386 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3387 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3388 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3390 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3391 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3392 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3393 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3394 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3395 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3396 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3398 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3399 the source files in the following example:
3400 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3401 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3402 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3403 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3404 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3405 links between source files with --preserve=links
3406 * cp accepts new options:
3407 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3408 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3409 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3410 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3411 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3412 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3413 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3414 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3415 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3417 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3418 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3419 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3420 even though it's older than dest.
3421 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3422 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3423 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3424 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3425 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3427 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3428 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3429 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3430 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3431 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3432 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3433 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3435 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3436 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3437 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3439 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3440 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3441 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3442 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3443 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3444 This is the default.
3446 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3447 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3448 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3449 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3450 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3452 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3455 ========================================================================
3456 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3457 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3460 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3461 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3463 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3464 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3465 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3466 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3467 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3469 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3470 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3471 that specifies a non-directory
3474 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3475 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3476 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3477 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3478 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3479 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3480 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3481 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3482 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3483 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3484 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3485 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3486 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3487 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3488 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3489 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3490 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3491 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3492 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3493 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3494 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3495 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3496 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3497 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3499 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3500 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3501 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3503 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3505 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3506 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3508 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3509 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3510 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3511 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3512 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3514 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3515 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3516 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3517 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3518 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3520 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3522 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3523 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3524 * still more portability fixes
3525 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3526 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3528 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3530 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3532 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3534 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3535 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3536 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3537 there is any time remaining
3538 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3540 ========================================================================
3541 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3542 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3544 This package began as the union of the following:
3545 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3547 ========================================================================
3549 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3551 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3552 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3553 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3554 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3555 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3556 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.