1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now only warn about failure to preserve ownership of symlinks.
8 cp (without -p) will no longer exit with a failure status, and mv will
9 also no longer leave such symlinks remaining in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
13 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
14 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
16 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
17 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
20 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
21 specifying -x nfs will no longer hang with problematic nfs mounts.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
24 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
27 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
28 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
31 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
32 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
34 tail -f with --pid=PID will now process all inotify events.
35 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
36 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
37 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
39 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
40 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
45 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
46 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
47 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
49 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
50 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
54 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
56 tail -f will now exit immediately if the output is piped
57 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
60 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
64 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
65 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
66 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
68 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
69 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
72 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
73 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
74 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
76 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
77 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
80 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
81 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
82 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
84 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
85 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
86 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
87 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
88 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
90 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
91 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
92 depending on the size of the first file processed.
93 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
97 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
98 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
99 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
100 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
102 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
103 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
104 time zone is indeterminate.
106 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
107 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
108 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
109 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
111 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
112 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
113 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
115 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
116 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
118 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
119 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
120 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
124 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
125 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
126 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
129 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
133 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
134 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
137 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
138 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
141 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
142 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
143 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
144 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
145 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
147 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
148 System V style platforms where this information is available only
149 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
151 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
152 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
154 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
155 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
158 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
159 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
160 defaults to a different SELinux context.
162 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
165 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
166 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
167 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
169 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
170 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
172 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
173 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
174 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
176 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
178 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
179 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
181 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
182 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
184 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
185 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
187 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
190 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
191 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
192 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
193 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
195 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
196 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
197 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
199 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
200 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
201 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
203 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
204 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
207 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
208 only doing so if --retry is specified.
209 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
211 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
214 ** Changes in behavior
216 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
218 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
219 values for any argument.
221 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
222 they are out of localtime range.
224 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
225 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
226 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
227 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
231 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
232 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
233 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
235 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
236 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
238 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
239 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
241 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
243 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
244 written to a terminal.
246 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
247 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
249 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
250 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
251 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
252 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
253 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
254 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
255 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
256 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
257 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
258 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
259 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
261 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
262 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
266 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
267 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
271 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
273 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
274 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
276 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
279 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
283 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
284 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
285 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
288 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
291 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
292 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
295 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
296 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
298 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
299 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
302 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
305 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
306 that specify an offset for the first field.
307 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
309 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
314 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
315 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
319 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
320 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
322 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
323 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
324 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
325 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
326 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
328 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
329 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
330 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
332 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
333 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
334 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
336 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
337 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
339 ** Changes in behavior
341 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
342 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
344 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
345 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
347 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
348 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
350 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
351 when outputting to a terminal.
353 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
357 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
358 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
360 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
361 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
363 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
364 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
365 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
367 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
368 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
370 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
371 upon detection of a directory cycle.
372 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
374 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
376 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
377 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
378 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
380 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
381 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
384 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
388 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
389 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
391 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
394 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
395 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
398 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
399 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
400 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
401 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
403 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
404 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
405 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
406 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
408 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
409 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
411 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
412 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
414 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
415 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
416 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
418 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
419 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
420 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
422 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
423 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
424 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
426 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
427 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
428 character at the 4GiB position.
429 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
431 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
432 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
434 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
435 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
437 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
438 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
441 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
444 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
445 replaced before inotify watches were created.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
448 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
449 [bug introduced in the beginning]
451 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
452 when those files are being created or renamed.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
457 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
458 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
459 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
460 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
462 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
463 on stderr approximately every second.
465 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
466 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
468 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
469 other than the default newline character.
471 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
472 a useful setting with high latency links.
474 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
475 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
477 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
478 and output errors in general.
480 ** Changes in behavior
482 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
483 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
484 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
485 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
487 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
488 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
489 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
490 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
491 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
493 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
494 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
496 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
498 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
499 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
501 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
502 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
506 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
507 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
509 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
510 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
512 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
513 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
515 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
516 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
518 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
520 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
521 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
522 documentation are provided.
525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
529 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
530 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
532 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
533 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
534 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
537 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
538 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
539 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
542 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
543 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
545 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
546 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
548 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
549 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
550 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
551 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
552 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
553 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
567 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
569 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
570 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
571 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
572 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
573 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
574 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
576 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
577 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
578 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
581 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
582 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
585 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
586 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
587 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
588 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
590 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
591 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
592 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
594 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
595 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
596 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
598 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
599 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
600 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
601 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
604 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
605 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
608 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
609 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
611 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
612 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
613 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
615 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
616 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
618 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
619 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
621 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
622 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
624 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
625 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
627 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
628 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
631 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
632 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
636 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
637 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
639 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
640 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
641 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
642 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
643 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
644 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
645 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
646 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
647 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
648 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
649 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
650 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
651 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
652 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
653 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
654 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
655 it suitable for embedded system.
657 ** Changes in behavior
659 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
660 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
662 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
663 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
665 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
666 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
667 will result in the delayed output of lines.
669 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
670 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
671 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
675 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
676 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
677 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
679 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
681 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
682 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
683 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
685 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
686 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
687 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
688 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
690 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
691 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
693 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
694 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
695 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
698 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
702 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
703 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
706 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
707 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
708 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
709 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
711 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
712 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
713 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
715 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
716 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
718 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
720 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
721 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
722 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
724 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
725 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
726 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
728 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
729 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
730 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
733 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
734 from the source, when copying across file systems.
735 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
737 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
738 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
739 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
741 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
742 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
744 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
745 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
746 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
747 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
749 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
750 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
751 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
753 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
754 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
755 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
759 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
760 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
761 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
763 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
764 used to identify the split points.
766 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
767 command line argument through to the output.
769 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
772 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
773 a NUL instead of a white space character.
775 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
776 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
778 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
780 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
781 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
782 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
784 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
785 unique groups with empty lines.
787 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
788 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
790 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
793 ** Changes in behavior
795 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
796 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
797 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
798 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
800 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
801 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
803 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
804 not just the transfer counts.
806 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
808 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
809 as per the documented interface.
813 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
815 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
816 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
817 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
818 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
820 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
821 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
822 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
823 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
825 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
826 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
827 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
829 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
830 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
832 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
833 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
835 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
839 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
842 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
846 numfmt: reformat numbers
850 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
851 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
852 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
854 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
855 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
856 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
858 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
859 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
863 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
864 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
866 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
867 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
870 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
871 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
872 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
874 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
875 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
876 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
878 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
879 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
880 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
882 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
883 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
884 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
886 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
889 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
890 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
892 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
893 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
894 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
896 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
897 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
898 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
900 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
901 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
902 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
904 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
905 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
906 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
907 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
909 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
910 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
911 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
913 ** Changes in behavior
915 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
916 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
917 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
918 'total' in the target column.
920 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
921 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
922 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
924 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
925 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
927 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
928 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
932 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
933 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
935 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
936 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
938 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
942 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
943 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
944 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
945 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
946 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
947 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
948 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
949 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
950 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
951 for a patched distribution package.
953 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
954 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
956 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
957 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
958 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
959 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
962 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
966 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
968 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
969 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
970 sha384sum and sha512sum.
974 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
975 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
976 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
977 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
980 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
981 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
983 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
984 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
985 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
986 eventually exits nonzero.
988 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
989 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
990 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
991 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
994 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
995 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
998 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
999 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1002 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1003 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1006 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1007 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1008 Before, this would infloop:
1009 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1010 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1012 ** Changes in behavior
1014 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1018 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1019 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1020 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1021 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1022 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1025 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1026 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1027 format-changing options.
1029 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1030 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1031 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1032 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1033 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1037 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1038 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1039 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1040 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1041 are run without following the instructions in README.
1043 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1044 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1045 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1046 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1047 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1048 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1049 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1052 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1056 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1057 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1058 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1059 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1061 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1062 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1063 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1066 sort -u could read freed memory.
1067 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1068 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1073 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1074 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1075 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1076 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1079 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1083 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1084 processes will not intersperse their output.
1085 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1087 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1088 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1089 date: invalid date '\260'
1090 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1092 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1093 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1094 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1095 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1097 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1098 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1099 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1101 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1102 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1103 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1104 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1105 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1108 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1111 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1112 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1114 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1115 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1116 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1118 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1119 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1120 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1124 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1126 ** Changes in behavior
1128 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1129 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1130 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1131 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1132 have any reason to include it here.
1136 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1137 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1138 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1140 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1141 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1142 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1149 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1150 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1151 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1152 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1153 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1154 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1156 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1157 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1158 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1159 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1160 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1161 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1162 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1164 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1165 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1167 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1168 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1172 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1173 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1175 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1177 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1179 ** Changes in behavior
1181 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1182 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1183 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1185 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1186 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1189 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1193 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1194 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1195 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1196 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1197 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1198 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1199 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1200 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1202 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1203 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1204 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1205 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1206 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1208 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1209 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1211 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1212 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1214 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1215 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1217 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1218 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1220 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1221 additional static suffix to output file names.
1223 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1224 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1225 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1227 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1228 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1232 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1233 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1234 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1236 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1237 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1238 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1239 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1240 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1241 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1243 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1244 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1245 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1246 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1247 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1249 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1250 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1251 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1252 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1256 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1257 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1258 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1260 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1261 instead of causing a usage failure.
1263 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1270 realpath: print resolved file names.
1274 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1277 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1280 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1281 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1282 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1283 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1284 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1285 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1287 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1288 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1289 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1291 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1292 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1295 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1296 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1297 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1298 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1301 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1303 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1304 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1306 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1307 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1308 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1310 ** Changes in behavior
1312 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1313 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1314 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1315 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1316 usually-short referent instead.
1318 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1319 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1320 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1321 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1328 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1329 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1330 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1332 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1335 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1340 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1341 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1343 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1344 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1345 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1346 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1348 ** Changes in behavior
1350 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1351 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1352 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1356 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1357 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1358 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1365 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1366 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1367 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1369 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1370 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1372 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1373 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1374 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1375 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1376 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1378 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1379 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1380 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1381 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1382 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1383 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1384 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1385 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1387 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1388 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1390 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1391 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1393 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1394 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1396 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1397 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1398 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1400 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1401 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1402 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1403 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1405 ** Changes in behavior
1407 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1408 when -v or -c specified.
1410 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1411 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1415 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1416 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1417 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1418 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1419 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1421 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1422 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1423 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1425 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1426 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1427 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1428 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1429 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1430 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1431 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1433 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1434 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1435 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1439 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1440 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1442 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1445 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1446 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1448 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1449 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1451 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1452 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1454 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1456 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1460 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1461 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1463 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1470 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1471 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1473 ** Changes in behavior
1475 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1476 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1477 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1478 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1479 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1480 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1481 resolved for 2.6.39.
1482 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1483 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1484 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1488 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1495 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1496 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1499 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1500 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1503 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1504 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1505 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1507 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1510 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1513 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1516 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1521 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1522 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1523 processed portion thereof.
1525 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1526 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1528 ** Changes in behavior
1530 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1531 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1532 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1534 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1535 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1536 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1538 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1539 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1541 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1542 Use --preserve-context instead.
1544 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1551 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1552 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1553 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1554 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1555 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1557 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1558 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1560 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1561 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1562 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1564 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1565 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1567 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1572 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1573 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1574 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1575 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1576 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1577 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1578 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1579 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1581 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1582 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1583 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1585 ** Changes in behavior
1587 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1588 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1589 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1596 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1597 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1601 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1605 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1606 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1608 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1609 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1611 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1612 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1614 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1615 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1616 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1619 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1620 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1622 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1623 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1624 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1626 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1628 ** Changes in behavior
1630 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1631 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1632 to the number of available processors.
1636 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1639 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1643 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1644 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1645 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1646 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1648 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1649 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1650 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1652 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1653 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1655 ** Changes in behavior
1657 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1658 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1660 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1661 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1662 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1663 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1664 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1665 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1667 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1668 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1669 the same way as the others.
1671 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1672 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1675 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1679 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1680 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1681 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1683 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1684 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1686 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1687 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1688 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1690 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1691 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1693 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1694 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1696 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1697 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1698 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1700 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1701 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1702 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1703 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1707 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1708 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1710 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1713 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1714 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1716 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1718 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1719 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1720 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1722 ** Changes in behavior
1724 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1725 rather than its aliased target.
1727 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1728 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1729 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1731 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1732 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1733 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1734 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1735 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1736 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1737 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1738 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1740 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1742 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1744 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1745 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1748 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1749 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1750 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1751 control like taskset for example.
1753 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1755 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1756 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1757 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1758 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1759 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1760 includes %C when context information is available.
1762 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1763 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1764 rather than a file system attribute.
1766 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1767 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1768 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1769 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1771 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1772 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1773 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1775 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1776 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1777 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1780 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1784 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1785 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1787 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1789 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1790 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1792 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1793 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1794 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1795 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1797 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1798 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1799 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1803 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1804 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1806 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1807 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1808 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1810 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1811 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1812 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1813 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1814 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1815 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1816 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1817 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1818 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1820 ** Changes in behavior
1822 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1823 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1825 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1826 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1829 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1833 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1834 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1835 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1836 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1840 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1841 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1843 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1844 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1845 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1846 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1848 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1849 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1850 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1853 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1857 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1858 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1859 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1861 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1862 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1863 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1865 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1866 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1868 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1869 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1870 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1871 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1873 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1874 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1875 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1877 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1878 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1879 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1880 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1882 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1883 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1886 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1887 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1888 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1889 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1891 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1892 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1895 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1896 processes will not intersperse their output.
1897 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1900 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1904 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1905 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1907 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1910 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1911 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1912 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1913 the presence of the empty string argument.
1914 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1916 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1917 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1918 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1919 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1921 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1922 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1924 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1925 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1926 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1928 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1929 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1930 and with a malicious user on the same system
1931 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1932 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1935 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1939 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1940 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1943 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1944 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1945 offending directory and all "contents."
1947 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1948 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1949 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1951 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1952 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1953 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1955 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1956 processes will not intersperse their output.
1957 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1958 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1960 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1961 output the name of the file to stdout.
1962 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1964 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1965 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1966 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1968 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1969 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1972 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1973 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1974 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1976 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1977 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1978 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1979 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1980 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1981 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1983 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1984 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1985 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1986 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1988 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1989 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1991 ** Changes in behavior
1993 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1994 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1995 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1996 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1997 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1999 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2000 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2001 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2002 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2004 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2006 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2007 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2008 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2009 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2010 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2014 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2018 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2019 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2021 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2022 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2024 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2025 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2026 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2028 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2029 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2032 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2036 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2037 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2038 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2040 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2041 to accommodate leap seconds.
2042 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2044 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2045 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2046 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2048 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2050 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2051 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2052 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2054 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2055 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2056 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2057 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2058 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2062 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2063 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2064 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2065 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2067 ** Changes in behavior
2069 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2070 environment variable is set.
2072 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2073 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2074 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2078 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2079 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2080 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2081 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2083 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2084 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2085 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2086 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2090 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2091 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2092 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2094 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2095 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2096 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2097 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2098 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2099 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2100 another improvement:
2102 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2103 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2106 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2110 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2111 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2112 and libraries tested at configure time.
2113 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2115 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2116 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2118 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2119 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2121 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2122 printing a summary to stderr.
2123 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2125 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2126 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2127 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2129 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2130 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2132 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2133 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2134 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2135 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2137 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2138 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2139 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2140 which is relatively unusual.
2141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2143 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2144 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2145 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2146 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2147 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2148 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2149 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2153 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2154 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2155 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2156 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2157 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2161 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2162 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2164 ** Changes in behavior
2166 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2167 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2168 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2169 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2170 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2173 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2177 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2178 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2180 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2181 before data copying has started.
2183 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2184 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2186 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2187 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2188 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2189 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2191 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2192 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2193 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2194 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2196 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2201 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2202 for its standard streams.
2204 ** Changes in behavior
2206 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2207 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2208 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2209 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2210 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2211 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2213 ** Deprecated options
2215 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2216 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2220 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2222 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2223 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2224 a btrfs file system.
2226 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2228 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2229 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2231 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2232 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2235 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2239 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2240 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2241 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2242 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2244 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2245 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2246 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2247 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2248 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2253 make check: two tests have been corrected
2257 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2258 inherited from gnulib.
2261 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2265 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2266 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2267 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2268 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2270 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2271 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2273 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2275 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2276 systems without xattr support.
2278 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2279 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2280 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2282 ** Changes in behavior
2284 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2285 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2286 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2287 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2289 ** Improved robustness
2291 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2292 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2293 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2294 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2295 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2296 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2297 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2298 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2299 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2303 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2304 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2306 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2307 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2308 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2309 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2310 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2313 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2317 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2318 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2319 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2323 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2324 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2325 data was read, or on process exit.
2326 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2328 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2329 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2330 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2333 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2334 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2335 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2336 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2338 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2339 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2341 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2342 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2344 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2345 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2346 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2348 ** Changes in behavior
2350 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2351 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2352 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2354 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2355 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2357 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2358 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2359 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2362 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2366 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2368 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2369 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2370 install: Never copies xattrs
2372 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2373 from overwriting any existing destination file
2375 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2376 mode where this feature is available.
2378 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2379 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2380 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2381 do not modify the destination at all.
2383 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2385 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2389 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2390 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2392 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2394 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2395 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2397 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2398 processing the first file name
2400 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2401 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2402 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2403 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2405 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2406 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2408 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2409 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2412 ** Changes in behavior
2414 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2415 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2417 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2418 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2419 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2421 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2422 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2424 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2426 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2427 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2428 is still marked with a '+'.
2431 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2435 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2436 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2440 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2441 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2442 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2443 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2444 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2445 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2447 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2448 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2450 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2451 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2453 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2455 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2456 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2457 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2459 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2460 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2462 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2463 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2464 used to factor large numbers.
2466 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2469 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2471 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2473 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2474 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2476 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2477 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2478 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2479 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2481 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2482 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2483 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2485 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2486 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2490 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2492 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2493 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2495 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2496 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2498 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2500 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2501 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2505 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2506 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2507 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2509 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2511 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2512 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2513 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2515 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2516 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2517 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2519 ** Changes in behavior
2521 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2522 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2525 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2529 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2530 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2531 'futimens' system calls.
2535 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2537 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2538 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2539 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2541 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2542 with no USERNAME argument.
2544 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2545 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2546 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2548 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2549 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2550 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2551 number of fields for some inputs.
2553 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2554 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2556 ** Changes in behavior
2558 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2559 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2562 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2566 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2568 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2569 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2570 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2571 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2573 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2574 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2576 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2577 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2579 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2580 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2582 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2583 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2584 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2585 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2587 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2588 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2589 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2590 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2591 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2592 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2594 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2595 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2597 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2598 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2599 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2601 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2602 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2604 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2605 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2607 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2608 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2609 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2610 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2612 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2613 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2615 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2616 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2618 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2619 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2620 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2624 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2625 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2627 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2628 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2629 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2630 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2634 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2635 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2637 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2639 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2643 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2644 which have negative errno values.
2648 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2652 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2656 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2660 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2664 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2665 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2666 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2668 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2669 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2670 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2671 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2675 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2676 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2677 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2678 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2681 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2685 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2687 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2688 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2689 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2692 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2696 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2697 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2699 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2701 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2703 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2705 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2709 ** Changes in behavior
2711 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2712 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2714 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2715 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2717 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2718 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2719 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2723 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2724 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2725 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2726 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2727 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2728 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2729 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2730 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2731 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2732 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2733 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2735 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2736 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2737 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2740 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2743 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2744 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2745 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2747 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2748 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2749 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2752 ** New build options
2754 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2755 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2756 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2757 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2759 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2760 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2761 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2762 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2763 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2764 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2765 of "make check" fail.
2767 ** Remove deprecated options
2769 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2770 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2771 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2772 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2773 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2775 ** Improved robustness
2777 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2778 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2779 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2780 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2781 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2782 loss of the contents of a/f.
2784 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2785 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2789 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2790 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2791 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2793 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2794 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2795 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2796 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2798 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2799 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2800 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2801 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2802 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2803 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2804 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2805 destination is a symlink.
2807 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2809 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2810 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2812 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2813 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2815 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2817 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2818 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2820 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2821 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2823 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2826 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2827 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2829 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2830 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2832 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2833 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2834 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2835 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2837 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2838 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2839 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2841 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2842 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2843 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2845 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2846 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2847 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2848 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2850 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2851 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2852 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2854 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2855 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2857 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2858 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2860 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2862 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2863 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2864 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2866 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2867 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2869 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2870 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2872 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2873 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2875 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2876 [present in the original version]
2879 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2883 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2885 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2886 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2887 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2889 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2890 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2892 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2896 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2897 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2899 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2900 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2902 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2903 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2905 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2906 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2907 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2908 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2909 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2910 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2912 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2913 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2916 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2917 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2919 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2922 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2923 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2924 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2926 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2927 directory is unreadable.
2929 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2930 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2931 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2933 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2934 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2935 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2936 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2937 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2940 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2941 Before it would print nothing.
2943 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2945 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2946 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2947 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2948 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2949 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2950 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2951 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2952 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2954 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2958 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2959 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2960 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2962 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2963 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2964 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2965 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2968 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2972 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2973 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2974 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2975 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2976 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2977 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2978 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2980 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2981 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2982 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2983 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2984 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2985 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2986 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2987 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2989 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2990 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2991 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2994 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2998 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2999 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3001 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3002 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3003 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3005 ** Improved robustness
3007 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3008 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3009 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3012 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3016 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3017 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3018 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3019 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3020 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3022 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3026 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3029 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3033 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3034 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3035 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3036 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3038 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3039 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3041 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3042 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3043 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3046 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3048 ** Improved robustness
3050 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3051 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3053 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3054 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3055 or NFS-mounted partition.
3057 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3058 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3062 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3063 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3064 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3065 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3066 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3067 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3069 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3070 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3072 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3073 or neglect to report file removal.
3075 For the "groups" command:
3077 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3078 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3080 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3082 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3084 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3088 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3089 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3092 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3094 ** Changes in behavior
3096 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3097 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3098 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3099 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3101 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3102 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3103 a final './' or '../' component.
3105 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3106 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3107 this only for pipes.
3109 ** Infrastructure changes
3111 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3112 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3113 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3114 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3118 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3119 name is "." or "..".
3121 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3122 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3123 dirent.d_type support.
3125 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3126 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3128 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3129 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3130 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3131 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3134 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3136 ** Changes in behavior
3138 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3142 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3143 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3147 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3148 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3149 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3151 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3152 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3154 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3155 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3157 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3159 ** Improved robustness
3161 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3162 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3163 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3165 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3166 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3169 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3170 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3172 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3173 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3175 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3176 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3178 ** Changes in behavior
3180 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3181 where the two are distinct.
3183 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3184 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3185 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3186 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3187 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3188 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3189 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3190 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3191 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3192 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3193 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3194 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3195 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3196 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3197 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3198 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3199 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3201 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3202 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3203 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3205 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3206 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3207 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3208 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3211 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3212 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3216 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3217 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3218 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3219 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3221 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3222 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3223 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3225 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3226 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3227 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3228 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3229 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3232 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3233 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3235 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3236 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3237 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3238 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3240 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3241 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3242 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3244 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3245 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3246 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3247 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3249 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3250 and sticky) with the -m option.
3252 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3253 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3254 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3255 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3256 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3258 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3259 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3261 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3265 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3266 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3267 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3268 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3270 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3272 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3274 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3275 silently ignoring one of them.
3277 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3278 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3279 containing this change was 5.92.
3281 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3282 automatically newline terminated.
3284 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3285 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3286 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3287 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3290 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3291 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3292 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3295 ** Scheduled for removal
3297 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3298 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3300 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3301 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3302 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3303 command to unlink a directory.
3305 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3306 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3307 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3308 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3312 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3313 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3314 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3315 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3316 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3317 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3321 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3322 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3324 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3326 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3327 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3328 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3330 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3331 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3334 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3335 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3337 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3338 list directories before files.
3340 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3341 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3342 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3343 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3346 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3348 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3350 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3351 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3352 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3354 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3355 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3359 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3360 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3361 usually printing nothing.
3363 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3365 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3366 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3367 them with hard-linked directories.
3369 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3370 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3371 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3373 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3374 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3375 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3377 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3380 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3381 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3383 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3384 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3386 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3387 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3389 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3390 all command-line arguments.
3392 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3394 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3396 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3397 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3399 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3401 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3402 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3403 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3404 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3405 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3407 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3408 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3410 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3411 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3412 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3413 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3415 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3417 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3421 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3422 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3424 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3425 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3427 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3428 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3430 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3431 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3433 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3434 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3436 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3438 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3439 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3440 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3443 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3445 ** Build-related bug fixes
3447 installing .mo files would fail
3450 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3454 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3456 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3459 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3463 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3464 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3468 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3470 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3471 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3473 ** Deprecated options
3475 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3476 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3478 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3482 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3484 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3485 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3486 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3487 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3489 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3492 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3498 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3503 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3505 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3507 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3508 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3509 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3511 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3512 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3513 problematic usages. These include:
3515 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3516 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3517 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3518 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3519 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3520 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3521 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3522 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3523 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3525 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3526 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3528 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3529 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3530 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3531 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3533 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3534 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3535 between binary and text files.
3537 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3541 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3545 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3546 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3548 head tac tail tee tr
3549 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3551 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3552 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3554 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3555 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3556 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3558 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3560 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3562 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3563 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3564 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3568 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3570 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3571 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3573 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3574 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3575 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3579 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3580 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3584 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3585 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3586 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3590 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3591 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3595 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3597 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3599 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3603 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3604 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3605 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3607 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3608 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3609 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3610 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3611 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3613 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3617 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3618 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3619 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3621 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3623 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3624 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3625 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3626 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3628 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3630 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3631 rather than silently wrapping around.
3633 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3634 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3636 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3637 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3639 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3640 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3641 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3642 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3644 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3646 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3648 ** Improved robustness
3650 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3651 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3652 no matter how large the result.
3654 ** Improved portability
3656 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3657 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3659 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3661 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3662 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3663 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3665 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3666 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3670 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3671 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3673 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3675 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3676 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3677 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3678 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3680 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3681 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3683 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3684 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3685 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3687 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3689 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3690 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3692 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3693 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3695 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3697 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3698 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3700 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3701 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3703 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3704 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3705 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3707 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3709 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3711 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3715 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3717 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3718 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3719 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3721 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3722 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3724 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3725 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3726 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3728 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3729 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3731 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3732 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3733 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3734 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3736 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3737 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3739 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3740 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3741 the file system does not support it.
3743 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3745 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3746 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3748 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3750 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3751 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3753 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3754 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3755 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3756 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3758 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3759 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3762 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3763 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3764 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3765 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3767 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3768 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3769 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3770 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3772 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3773 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3775 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3777 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3778 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3779 reporting incorrect results.
3783 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3784 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3786 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3789 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3791 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3792 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3794 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3795 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3797 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3800 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3801 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3802 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3803 the file name does not look like a page range.
3805 printf has several changes:
3807 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3808 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3810 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3811 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3812 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3814 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3815 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3818 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3819 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3821 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3822 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3824 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3826 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3827 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3829 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3831 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3833 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3834 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3835 when first encountering the directory.
3839 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3840 output; POSIX requires this.
3842 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3843 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3845 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3847 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3848 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3850 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3851 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3853 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3854 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3855 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3856 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3857 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3858 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3859 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3861 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3862 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3863 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3865 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3866 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3868 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3870 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3872 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3873 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3874 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3875 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3877 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3881 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3882 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3883 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3884 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3885 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3887 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3888 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3889 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3891 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3892 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3894 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3895 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3897 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3898 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3899 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3900 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3901 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3903 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3904 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3906 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3907 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3909 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3911 nocreat do not create the output file
3912 excl fail if the output file already exists
3913 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3914 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3916 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3918 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3919 direct use direct I/O for data
3920 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3921 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3922 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3923 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3924 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3926 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3928 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3929 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3932 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3933 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3934 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3935 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3936 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3937 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3939 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3940 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3942 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3945 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3947 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3949 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3950 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3952 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3953 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3954 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3956 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3957 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3958 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3960 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3962 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3963 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
3965 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3966 for compatibility with bash.
3968 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3970 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3971 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3972 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3973 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3975 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3976 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3978 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3979 ls supports TABSIZE.
3980 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3981 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3982 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3984 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3987 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3989 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3990 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3991 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3992 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3993 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3994 an offset, not as a file name.
3996 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3997 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3999 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4000 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4002 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4003 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4005 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4006 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4007 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4009 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4010 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4012 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4013 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4017 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4019 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4021 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4025 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4026 or more arguments between partitions.
4028 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4029 holes in the destination.
4031 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4032 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4033 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4034 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4035 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4036 terminates immediately.
4038 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4040 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4042 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4043 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4044 not the empty string.
4046 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4047 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4051 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4052 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4053 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4056 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4063 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4067 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4068 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4070 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4071 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4073 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4074 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4075 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4078 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4082 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4083 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4085 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4086 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4088 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4089 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4090 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4092 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4094 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4097 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4099 ** Configuration option
4101 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4102 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4106 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4107 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4111 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4112 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4113 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4116 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4117 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4118 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4119 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4120 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4121 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4122 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4125 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4129 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4130 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4131 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4133 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4134 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4136 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4138 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4139 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4140 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4141 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4143 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4145 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4146 not just the ones that reference directories
4148 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4149 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4151 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4152 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4153 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4155 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4156 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4157 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4158 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4159 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4160 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4162 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4167 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4168 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4170 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4172 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4174 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4176 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4177 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4179 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4180 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4182 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4184 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4188 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4190 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4192 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4193 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4194 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4195 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4196 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4198 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4199 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4201 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4202 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4204 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4205 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4207 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4208 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4209 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4213 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4214 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4215 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4216 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4217 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4218 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4219 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4220 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4221 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4222 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4223 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4224 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4225 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4226 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4228 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4230 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4231 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4233 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4235 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4237 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4238 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4240 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4242 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4243 without a trailing newline.
4245 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4246 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4248 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4251 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4255 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4257 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4259 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4260 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4261 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4262 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4264 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4266 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4267 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4268 be printed without leading spaces.
4270 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4271 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4276 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4277 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4278 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4280 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4282 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4283 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4285 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4286 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4288 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4289 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4291 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4293 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4295 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4297 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4298 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4300 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4302 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4304 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4305 byte offsets are specified.
4308 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4311 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4314 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4315 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4316 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4317 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4318 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4319 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4320 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4321 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4322 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4323 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4324 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4325 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4326 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4327 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4328 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4329 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4330 directory where M has write access.
4331 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4332 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4333 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4336 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4337 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4338 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4339 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4340 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4341 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4342 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4343 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4344 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4345 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4346 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4347 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4348 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4349 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4350 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4351 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4352 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4353 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4354 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4355 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4356 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4357 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4358 appeared one additional time.
4360 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4361 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4362 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4363 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4366 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4367 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4368 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4369 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4370 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4371 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4372 if there were more than 338.
4374 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4375 - false --help now exits nonzero
4378 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4379 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4380 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4381 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4384 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4385 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4386 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4387 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4388 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4391 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4392 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4393 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4394 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4395 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4396 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4397 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4400 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4401 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4402 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4403 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4404 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4405 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4407 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4408 under certain unusual conditions
4409 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4410 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4413 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4414 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4415 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4416 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4417 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4418 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4419 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4420 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4421 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4422 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4423 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4424 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4425 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4426 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4427 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4428 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4431 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4432 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4435 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4436 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4437 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4438 involving hard-linked directories
4439 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4440 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4441 character-special and block files
4444 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4445 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4446 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4447 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4448 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4449 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4450 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4451 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4452 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4454 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4455 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4456 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4457 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4458 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4459 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4460 specified on the command line.
4461 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4462 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4463 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4464 the first file untouched.
4465 * readlink: new program
4466 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4467 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4468 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4469 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4470 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4471 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4474 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4475 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4476 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4477 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4478 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4479 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4480 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4481 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4482 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4483 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4484 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4485 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4487 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4488 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4489 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4491 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4492 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4493 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4494 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4495 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4496 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4497 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4498 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4501 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4502 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4505 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4506 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4507 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4508 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4509 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4510 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4511 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4514 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4515 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4517 ========================================================================
4518 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4519 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4522 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4524 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4525 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4526 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4527 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4528 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4529 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4530 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4531 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4532 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4533 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4534 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4535 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4537 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4538 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4539 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4540 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4542 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4545 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4547 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4548 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4549 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4550 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4551 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4552 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4553 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4556 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4557 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4558 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4559 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4560 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4561 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4562 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4563 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4564 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4565 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4566 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4567 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4568 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4569 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4570 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4571 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4573 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4574 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4576 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4577 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4578 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4579 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4580 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4581 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4583 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4584 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4585 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4586 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4587 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4588 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4589 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4591 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4592 the source files in the following example:
4593 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4594 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4595 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4596 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4597 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4598 links between source files with --preserve=links
4599 * cp accepts new options:
4600 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4601 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4602 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4603 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4604 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4605 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4606 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4607 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4608 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4610 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4611 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4612 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4613 even though it's older than dest.
4614 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4615 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4616 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4617 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4618 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4620 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4621 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4622 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4623 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4624 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4625 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4626 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4628 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4629 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4630 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4632 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4633 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4634 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4635 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4636 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4637 This is the default.
4639 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4640 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4641 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4642 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4643 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4645 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4648 ========================================================================
4649 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4650 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4653 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4654 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4656 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4657 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4658 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4659 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4660 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4662 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4663 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4664 that specifies a non-directory
4667 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4668 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4669 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4670 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4671 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4672 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4673 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4674 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4675 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4676 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4677 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4678 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4679 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4680 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4681 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4682 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4683 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4684 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4685 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4686 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4687 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4688 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4689 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4690 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4692 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4693 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4694 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4696 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4698 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4699 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4701 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4702 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4703 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4704 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4705 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4707 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4708 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4709 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4710 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4711 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4713 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4715 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4716 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4717 * still more portability fixes
4718 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4719 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4721 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4723 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4725 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4727 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4728 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4729 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4730 there is any time remaining
4731 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4733 ========================================================================
4734 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4735 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4737 This package began as the union of the following:
4738 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4740 ========================================================================
4742 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4744 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4745 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4746 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4747 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4748 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4749 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.