1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
10 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS file systems
11 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
12 support, but the GPFS magic number wasn't in the usual places then.]
15 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
19 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
20 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
21 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
23 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
26 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
31 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
32 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
34 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
35 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
36 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
37 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
39 ** Changes in behavior
41 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
42 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
43 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
47 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
48 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
49 only .tar.xz files is enough.
52 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
56 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
57 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
58 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
60 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
61 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
63 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
64 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
65 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
66 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
67 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
69 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
70 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
71 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
72 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
73 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
74 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
75 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
76 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
78 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
79 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
81 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
82 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
84 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
87 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
88 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
89 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
91 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
92 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
93 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
96 ** Changes in behavior
98 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
99 when -v or -c specified.
101 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
102 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
106 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
107 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
108 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
109 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
110 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
112 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
113 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
114 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
116 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
117 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
118 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
119 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
120 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
121 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
122 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
124 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
125 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
126 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
130 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
131 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
133 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
136 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
137 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
139 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
140 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
142 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
143 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
145 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
147 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
151 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
152 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
154 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
157 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
161 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
162 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
164 ** Changes in behavior
166 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
167 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
168 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
169 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
170 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
171 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
173 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
174 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
175 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
179 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
186 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
187 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
190 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
191 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
194 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
195 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
198 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
201 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
202 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
204 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
207 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
208 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
212 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
213 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
214 processed portion thereof.
216 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
217 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
219 ** Changes in behavior
221 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
222 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
223 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
225 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
226 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
227 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
229 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
230 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
232 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
233 Use --preserve-context instead.
235 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
238 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
242 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
243 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
244 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
245 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
248 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
249 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
251 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
252 reject file names invalid for that file system.
254 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
255 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
259 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
260 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
261 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
262 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
263 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
264 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
265 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
266 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
268 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
269 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
270 the same number of fields are output for each line.
272 ** Changes in behavior
274 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
275 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
276 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
279 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
283 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
284 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
288 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
292 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
293 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
295 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
296 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
298 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
299 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
301 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
302 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
303 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
304 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
306 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
307 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
309 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
310 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
311 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
313 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
315 ** Changes in behavior
317 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
318 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
319 to the number of available processors.
323 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
326 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
330 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
331 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
332 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
333 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
335 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
336 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
337 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
339 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
340 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
342 ** Changes in behavior
344 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
345 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
347 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
348 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
349 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
350 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
351 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
352 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
354 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
355 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
356 the same way as the others.
359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
363 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
364 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
365 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
367 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
368 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
370 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
371 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
372 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
374 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
377 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
378 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
380 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
381 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
382 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
384 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
385 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
386 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
387 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
391 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
392 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
394 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
397 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
398 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
400 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
402 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
403 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
404 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
406 ** Changes in behavior
408 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
409 rather than its aliased target.
411 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
412 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
413 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
415 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
416 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
417 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
418 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
419 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
420 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
421 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
422 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
424 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
426 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
428 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
429 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
432 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
433 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
434 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
435 control like taskset for example.
437 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
439 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
440 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
441 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
442 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
443 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
444 includes %C when context information is available.
446 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
447 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
448 rather than a file system attribute.
450 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
451 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
452 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
453 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
455 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
456 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
457 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
459 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
460 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
461 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
464 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
468 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
471 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
473 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
476 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
477 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
478 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
479 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
481 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
482 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
487 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
488 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
490 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
491 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
492 duration after the initial signal was sent.
494 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
495 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
496 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
497 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
498 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
499 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
500 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
501 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
502 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
504 ** Changes in behavior
506 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
507 sequence when it would be a no-op.
509 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
510 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
513 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
517 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
518 of available processors, which may not have been the case
519 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
524 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
525 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
527 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
528 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
529 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
530 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
532 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
533 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
534 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
537 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
541 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
542 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
545 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
546 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
547 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
549 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
552 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
553 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
554 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
557 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
558 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
559 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
561 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
562 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
563 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
566 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
567 renamed-aside and then recreated.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
570 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
571 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
572 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
575 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
576 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
579 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
580 processes will not intersperse their output.
581 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
584 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
588 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
589 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
591 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
594 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
595 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
596 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
597 the presence of the empty string argument.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
600 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
601 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
602 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
603 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
605 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
608 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
609 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
610 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
612 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
613 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
614 and with a malicious user on the same system
615 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
619 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
623 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
624 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
627 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
628 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
629 offending directory and all "contents."
631 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
632 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
633 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
635 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
636 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
637 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
639 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
640 processes will not intersperse their output.
641 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
642 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
644 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
645 output the name of the file to stdout.
646 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
648 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
649 call fails with errno == EACCES.
650 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
652 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
653 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
656 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
657 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
658 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
660 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
661 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
662 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
663 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
664 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
665 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
667 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
668 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
669 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
670 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
672 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
673 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
675 ** Changes in behavior
677 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
678 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
679 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
680 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
681 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
683 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
684 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
685 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
686 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
688 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
690 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
691 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
692 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
693 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
694 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
698 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
702 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
703 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
705 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
706 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
708 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
709 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
710 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
712 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
713 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
716 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
720 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
721 when the source file doesn't have write access.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
724 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
725 to accommodate leap seconds.
726 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
728 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
729 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
730 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
732 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
734 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
735 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
736 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
738 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
739 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
740 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
741 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
742 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
746 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
747 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
748 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
749 directory or a symlink to a directory.
751 ** Changes in behavior
753 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
754 environment variable is set.
756 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
757 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
758 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
762 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
763 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
764 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
765 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
767 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
768 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
769 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
770 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
774 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
775 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
776 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
778 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
779 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
780 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
781 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
782 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
783 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
786 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
787 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
794 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
795 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
796 and libraries tested at configure time.
797 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
799 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
802 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
805 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
806 printing a summary to stderr.
807 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
809 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
810 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
811 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
813 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
816 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
817 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
818 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
819 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
821 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
822 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
823 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
824 which is relatively unusual.
825 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
827 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
828 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
829 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
830 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
831 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
832 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
833 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
837 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
838 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
839 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
840 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
841 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
845 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
846 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
848 ** Changes in behavior
850 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
851 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
852 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
853 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
854 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
857 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
861 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
862 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
864 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
865 before data copying has started.
867 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
868 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
870 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
871 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
872 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
873 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
875 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
876 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
877 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
878 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
880 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
885 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
886 for its standard streams.
888 ** Changes in behavior
890 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
891 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
892 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
893 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
894 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
895 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
897 ** Deprecated options
899 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
900 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
904 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
906 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
907 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
910 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
912 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
913 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
915 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
916 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
919 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
923 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
924 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
925 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
926 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
928 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
929 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
930 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
931 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
932 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
937 make check: two tests have been corrected
941 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
942 inherited from gnulib.
945 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
949 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
950 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
951 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
952 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
954 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
955 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
957 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
959 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
960 systems without xattr support.
962 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
963 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
964 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
966 ** Changes in behavior
968 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
969 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
970 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
971 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
973 ** Improved robustness
975 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
976 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
977 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
978 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
979 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
980 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
981 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
982 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
983 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
987 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
988 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
990 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
991 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
992 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
993 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
994 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
997 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1001 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1002 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1003 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1007 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1008 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1009 data was read, or on process exit.
1010 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1012 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1013 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1014 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1017 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1018 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1019 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1020 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1022 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1023 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1025 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1028 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1029 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1030 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1032 ** Changes in behavior
1034 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1035 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1036 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1038 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1039 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1041 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1042 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1043 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1046 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1050 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1052 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1053 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1054 install: Never copies xattrs
1056 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1057 from overwriting any existing destination file
1059 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1060 mode where this feature is available.
1062 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1063 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1064 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1065 do not modify the destination at all.
1067 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1069 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1073 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1076 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1078 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1079 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1081 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1082 processing the first file name
1084 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1085 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1086 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1087 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1089 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1090 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1092 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1093 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1096 ** Changes in behavior
1098 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1099 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1101 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1102 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1103 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1105 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1106 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1108 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1110 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1111 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1112 is still marked with a '+'.
1115 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1119 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1120 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1124 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1125 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1126 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1127 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1128 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1129 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1131 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1132 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1134 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1135 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1137 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1139 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1140 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1141 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1143 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1144 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1146 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1147 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1148 used to factor large numbers.
1150 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1153 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1155 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1157 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1158 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1160 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1161 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1162 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1163 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1165 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1166 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1167 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1169 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1170 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1174 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1176 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1177 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1179 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1180 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1182 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1184 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1185 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1189 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1190 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1191 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1193 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1195 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1196 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1197 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1199 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1200 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1201 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1203 ** Changes in behavior
1205 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1206 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1209 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1213 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1214 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1215 'futimens' system calls.
1219 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1221 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1222 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1223 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1225 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1226 with no USERNAME argument.
1228 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1229 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1230 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1232 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1233 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1234 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1235 number of fields for some inputs.
1237 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1238 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1240 ** Changes in behavior
1242 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1243 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1246 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1250 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1252 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1253 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1254 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1255 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1257 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1258 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1260 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1261 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1263 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1264 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1266 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1267 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1268 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1271 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1272 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1273 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1274 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1275 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1276 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1278 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1279 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1281 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1282 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1283 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1285 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1286 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1288 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1289 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1291 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1292 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1293 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1294 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1296 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1297 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1299 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1300 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1302 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1303 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1304 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1308 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1309 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1311 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1312 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1313 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1314 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1318 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1319 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1321 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1323 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1327 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1328 which have negative errno values.
1332 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1336 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1340 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1344 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1348 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1349 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1350 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1352 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1353 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1354 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1355 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1359 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1360 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1361 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1362 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1365 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1369 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1371 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1372 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1376 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1380 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1381 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1383 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1385 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1387 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1389 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1393 ** Changes in behavior
1395 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1396 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1398 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1399 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1401 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1402 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1403 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1407 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1408 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1409 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1410 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1411 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1412 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1413 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1414 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1415 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1416 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1417 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1419 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1420 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1421 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1424 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1427 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1428 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1429 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1431 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1432 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1433 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1436 ** New build options
1438 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1439 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1440 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1441 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1443 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1444 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1445 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1446 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1447 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1448 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1449 of "make check" fail.
1451 ** Remove deprecated options
1453 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1454 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1455 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1456 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1457 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1459 ** Improved robustness
1461 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1462 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1463 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1464 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1465 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1466 loss of the contents of a/f.
1468 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1469 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1473 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1474 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1475 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1477 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1478 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1479 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1480 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1482 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1483 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1484 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1485 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1486 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1487 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1488 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1489 destination is a symlink.
1491 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1493 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1494 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1496 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1497 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1499 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1501 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1502 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1504 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1505 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1507 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1510 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1511 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1513 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1514 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1516 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1517 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1518 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1519 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1521 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1522 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1523 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1525 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1526 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1527 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1529 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1530 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1531 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1532 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1534 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1535 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1536 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1538 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1539 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1541 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1542 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1544 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1546 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1547 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1548 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1550 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1551 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1553 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1554 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1556 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1557 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1559 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1560 [present in the original version]
1563 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1567 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1569 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1570 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1571 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1573 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1574 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1576 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1580 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1581 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1583 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1584 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1586 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1587 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1589 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1590 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1591 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1592 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1593 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1594 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1596 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1597 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1600 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1601 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1603 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1606 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1607 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1608 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1610 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1611 directory is unreadable.
1613 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1614 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1615 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1617 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1618 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1619 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1620 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1621 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1624 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1625 Before it would print nothing.
1627 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1629 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1630 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1631 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1632 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1633 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1634 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1635 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1636 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1638 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1642 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1643 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1644 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1646 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1647 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1648 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1649 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1652 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1656 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1657 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1658 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1659 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1660 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1661 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1662 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1664 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1665 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1666 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1667 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1668 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1669 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1670 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1671 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1673 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1674 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1675 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1678 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1682 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1683 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1685 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1686 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1687 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1689 ** Improved robustness
1691 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1692 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1693 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1696 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1700 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1701 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1702 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1703 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1704 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1706 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1710 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1713 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1717 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1718 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1719 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1720 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1722 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1723 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1725 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1726 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1727 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1730 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1732 ** Improved robustness
1734 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1735 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1737 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1738 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1739 or NFS-mounted partition.
1741 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1742 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1746 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1747 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1748 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1749 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1750 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1751 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1753 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1754 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1756 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1757 or neglect to report file removal.
1759 For the "groups" command:
1761 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1762 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1764 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1766 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1768 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1772 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1773 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1776 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1778 ** Changes in behavior
1780 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1781 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1782 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1783 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1785 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1786 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1787 a final `./' or `../' component.
1789 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1790 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1791 this only for pipes.
1793 ** Infrastructure changes
1795 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1796 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1797 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1798 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1802 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1803 name is "." or "..".
1805 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1806 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1807 dirent.d_type support.
1809 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1810 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1812 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1813 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1814 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1815 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1818 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1820 ** Changes in behavior
1822 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1826 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1827 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1831 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1832 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1833 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1835 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1836 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1838 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1839 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1841 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1843 ** Improved robustness
1845 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1846 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1847 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1849 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1850 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1853 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1854 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1856 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1857 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1859 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1860 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1862 ** Changes in behavior
1864 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1865 where the two are distinct.
1867 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1868 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1869 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1870 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1871 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1872 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1873 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1874 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1875 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1876 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1877 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1878 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1879 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1880 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1881 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1882 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1883 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1885 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1886 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1887 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1889 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1890 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1891 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1892 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1895 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1896 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1900 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1901 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1902 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1903 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1905 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1906 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1907 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1909 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1910 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1911 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1912 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1913 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1916 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1917 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1919 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1920 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1921 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1922 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1924 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1925 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1926 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1928 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1929 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1930 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1931 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1933 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1934 and sticky) with the -m option.
1936 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1937 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1938 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1939 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1940 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1942 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1943 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1945 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1949 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1950 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1951 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1952 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1954 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1956 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1958 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1959 silently ignoring one of them.
1961 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1962 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1963 containing this change was 5.92.
1965 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1966 automatically newline terminated.
1968 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1969 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1970 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1971 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1974 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1975 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1976 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1979 ** Scheduled for removal
1981 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1982 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1984 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1985 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1986 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1987 command to unlink a directory.
1989 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1990 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1991 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1992 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1996 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1997 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1998 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1999 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2000 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2001 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2005 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2006 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2008 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2010 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2011 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2012 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2014 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2015 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2018 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2019 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2021 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2022 list directories before files.
2024 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2025 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2026 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2027 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2030 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2032 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2034 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2035 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2036 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2038 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2039 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2043 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2044 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2045 usually printing nothing.
2047 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2049 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2050 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2051 them with hard-linked directories.
2053 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2054 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2055 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2057 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2058 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2059 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2061 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2064 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2065 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2067 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2068 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2070 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2071 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2073 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2074 all command-line arguments.
2076 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2078 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2080 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2081 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2083 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2085 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2086 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2087 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2088 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2089 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2091 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2092 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2094 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2095 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2096 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2097 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2099 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2101 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2105 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2106 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2108 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2109 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2111 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2112 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2114 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2115 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2117 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2118 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2120 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2122 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2123 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2124 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2127 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2129 ** Build-related bug fixes
2131 installing .mo files would fail
2134 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2138 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2140 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2143 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2147 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2148 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2152 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2154 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2155 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2157 ** Deprecated options
2159 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2160 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2162 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2166 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2168 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2169 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2170 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2171 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2173 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2176 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2182 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2187 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2189 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2191 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2192 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2193 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2195 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2196 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2197 problematic usages. These include:
2199 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2200 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2201 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2202 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2203 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2204 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2205 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2206 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2207 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2209 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2210 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2212 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2213 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2214 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2215 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2217 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2218 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2219 between binary and text files.
2221 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2225 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2229 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2230 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2232 head tac tail tee tr
2233 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2235 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2236 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2238 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2239 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2240 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2242 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2244 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2246 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2247 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2248 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2252 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2254 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2255 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2257 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2258 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2259 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2263 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2264 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2268 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2269 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2270 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2274 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2275 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2279 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2281 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2283 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2287 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2288 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2289 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2291 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2292 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2293 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2294 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2295 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2297 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2301 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2302 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2303 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2305 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2307 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2308 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2309 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2310 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2312 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2314 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2315 rather than silently wrapping around.
2317 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2318 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2320 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2321 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2323 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2324 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2325 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2326 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2328 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2330 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2332 ** Improved robustness
2334 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2335 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2336 no matter how large the result.
2338 ** Improved portability
2340 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2341 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2343 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2345 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2346 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2347 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2349 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2350 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2354 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2355 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2357 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2359 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2360 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2361 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2362 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2364 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2365 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2367 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2368 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2369 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2371 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2373 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2374 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2376 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2377 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2379 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2381 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2382 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2384 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2385 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2387 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2388 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2389 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2391 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2393 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2395 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2399 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2401 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2402 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2403 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2405 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2406 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2408 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2409 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2410 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2412 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2413 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2415 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2416 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2417 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2418 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2420 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2421 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2423 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2424 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2425 the file system does not support it.
2427 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2429 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2430 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2432 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2434 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2435 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2437 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2438 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2439 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2440 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2442 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2443 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2446 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2447 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2448 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2449 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2451 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2452 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2453 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2454 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2456 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2457 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2459 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2461 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2462 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2463 reporting incorrect results.
2467 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2468 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2470 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2473 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2475 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2476 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2478 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2479 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2481 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2484 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2485 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2486 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2487 the file name does not look like a page range.
2489 printf has several changes:
2491 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2492 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2494 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2495 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2496 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2498 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2499 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2502 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2503 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2505 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2506 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2508 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2510 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2511 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2513 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2515 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2517 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2518 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2519 when first encountering the directory.
2523 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2524 output; POSIX requires this.
2526 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2527 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2529 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2531 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2532 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2534 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2535 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2537 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2538 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2539 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2540 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2541 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2542 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2543 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2545 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2546 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2547 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2549 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2550 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2552 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2554 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2556 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2557 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2558 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2559 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2561 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2565 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2566 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2567 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2568 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2569 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2571 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2572 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2573 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2575 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2576 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2578 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2579 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2581 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2582 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2583 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2584 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2585 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2587 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2588 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2590 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2591 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2593 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2595 nocreat do not create the output file
2596 excl fail if the output file already exists
2597 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2598 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2600 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2602 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2603 direct use direct I/O for data
2604 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2605 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2606 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2607 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2608 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2610 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2612 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2613 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2616 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2617 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2618 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2619 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2620 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2621 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2623 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2624 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2626 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2629 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2631 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2633 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2634 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2636 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2637 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2638 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2640 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2641 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2642 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2644 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2646 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2647 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2649 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2650 for compatibility with bash.
2652 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2654 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2655 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2656 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2657 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2659 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2660 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2662 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2663 ls supports TABSIZE.
2664 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2665 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2666 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2668 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2671 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2673 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2674 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2675 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2676 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2677 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2678 an offset, not as a file name.
2680 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2681 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2683 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2684 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2686 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2687 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2689 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2690 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2691 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2693 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2694 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2696 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2697 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2701 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2703 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2705 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2709 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2710 or more arguments between partitions.
2712 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2713 holes in the destination.
2715 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2716 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2717 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2718 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2719 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2720 terminates immediately.
2722 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2724 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2726 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2727 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2728 not the empty string.
2730 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2731 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2735 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2736 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2737 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2740 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2747 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2751 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2752 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2754 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2755 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2757 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2758 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2759 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2762 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2766 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2767 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2769 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2770 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2772 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2773 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2774 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2776 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2778 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2781 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2783 ** Configuration option
2785 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2786 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2790 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2791 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2795 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2796 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2797 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2800 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2801 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2802 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2803 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2804 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2805 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2806 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2809 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2813 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2814 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2815 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2817 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2818 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2820 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2822 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2823 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2824 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2825 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2827 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2829 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2830 not just the ones that reference directories
2832 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2833 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2835 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2836 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2837 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2839 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2840 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2841 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2842 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2843 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2844 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2846 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2851 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2852 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2854 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2856 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2858 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2860 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2861 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2863 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2864 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2866 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2868 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2872 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2874 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2876 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2877 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2878 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2879 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2880 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2882 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2883 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2885 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2886 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2888 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2889 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2891 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2892 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2893 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2897 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2898 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2899 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2900 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2901 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2902 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2903 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2904 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2905 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2906 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2907 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2908 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2909 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2910 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2912 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2914 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2915 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2917 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2919 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2921 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2922 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2924 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2926 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2927 without a trailing newline.
2929 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2930 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2932 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2935 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2939 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2941 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2943 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2944 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2945 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2946 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2948 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2950 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2951 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2952 be printed without leading spaces.
2954 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2955 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2960 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2961 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2962 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2964 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2966 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2967 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2969 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2970 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2972 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2973 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2975 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2977 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2979 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2981 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2982 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2984 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2986 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2988 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2989 byte offsets are specified.
2992 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2995 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2998 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2999 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3000 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3001 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3002 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3003 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3004 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3005 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3006 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3007 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3008 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3009 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3010 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3011 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3012 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3013 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3014 directory where M has write access.
3015 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3016 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3017 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3020 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3021 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3022 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3023 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3024 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3025 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3026 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3027 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3028 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3029 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3030 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3031 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3032 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3033 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3034 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3035 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3036 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3037 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3038 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3039 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3040 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3041 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3042 appeared one additional time.
3044 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3045 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3046 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3047 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3050 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3051 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3052 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3053 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3054 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3055 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3056 if there were more than 338.
3058 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3059 - false --help now exits nonzero
3062 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3063 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3064 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3065 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3068 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3069 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3070 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3071 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3072 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3075 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3076 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3077 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3078 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3079 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3080 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3081 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3084 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3085 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3086 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3087 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3088 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3089 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3091 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3092 under certain unusual conditions
3093 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3094 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3097 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3098 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3099 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3100 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3101 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3102 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3103 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3104 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3105 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3106 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3107 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3108 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3109 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3110 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3111 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3112 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3115 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3116 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3119 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3120 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3121 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3122 involving hard-linked directories
3123 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3124 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3125 character-special and block files
3128 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3129 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3130 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3131 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3132 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3133 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3134 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3135 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3136 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3138 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3139 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3140 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3141 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3142 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3143 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3144 specified on the command line.
3145 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3146 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3147 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3148 the first file untouched.
3149 * readlink: new program
3150 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3151 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3152 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3153 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3154 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3155 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3158 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3159 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3160 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3161 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3162 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3163 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3164 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3165 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3166 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3167 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3168 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3169 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3171 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3172 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3173 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3175 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3176 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3177 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3178 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3179 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3180 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3181 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3182 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3185 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3186 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3189 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3190 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3191 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3192 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3193 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3194 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3195 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3198 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3199 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3201 ========================================================================
3202 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3203 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3206 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3208 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3209 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3210 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3211 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3212 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3213 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3214 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3215 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3216 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3217 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3218 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3219 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3221 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3222 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3223 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3224 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3226 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3229 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3231 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3232 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3233 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3234 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3235 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3236 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3237 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3240 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3241 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3242 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3243 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3244 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3245 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3246 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3247 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3248 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3249 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3250 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3251 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3252 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3253 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3254 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3255 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3257 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3258 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3260 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3261 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3262 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3263 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3264 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3265 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3267 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3268 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3269 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3270 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3271 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3272 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3273 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3275 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3276 the source files in the following example:
3277 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3278 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3279 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3280 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3281 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3282 links between source files with --preserve=links
3283 * cp accepts new options:
3284 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3285 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3286 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3287 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3288 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3289 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3290 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3291 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3292 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3294 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3295 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3296 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3297 even though it's older than dest.
3298 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3299 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3300 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3301 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3302 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3304 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3305 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3306 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3307 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3308 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3309 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3310 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3312 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3313 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3314 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3316 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3317 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3318 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3319 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3320 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3321 This is the default.
3323 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3324 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3325 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3326 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3327 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3329 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3332 ========================================================================
3333 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3334 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3337 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3338 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3340 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3341 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3342 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3343 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3344 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3346 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3347 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3348 that specifies a non-directory
3351 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3352 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3353 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3354 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3355 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3356 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3357 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3358 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3359 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3360 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3361 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3362 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3363 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3364 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3365 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3366 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3367 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3368 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3369 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3370 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3371 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3372 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3373 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3374 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3376 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3377 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3378 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3380 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3382 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3383 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3385 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3386 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3387 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3388 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3389 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3391 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3392 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3393 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3394 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3395 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3397 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3399 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3400 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3401 * still more portability fixes
3402 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3403 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3405 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3407 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3409 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3411 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3412 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3413 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3414 there is any time remaining
3415 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3417 ========================================================================
3418 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3419 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3421 This package began as the union of the following:
3422 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3424 ========================================================================
3426 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3428 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3429 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3430 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3431 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3432 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3433 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.