1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
8 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
9 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
11 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
12 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
13 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
17 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
20 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
21 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
24 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
25 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
26 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
28 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
29 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
30 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
32 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
33 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
34 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
36 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
37 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
38 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
40 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
43 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
44 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
46 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
47 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
48 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
50 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
51 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
55 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
56 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
58 ** Changes in behavior
60 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
61 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
62 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
63 'total' in the target column.
65 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
66 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
68 df now elides any entry with the early-boot pseudo file system type
69 "rootfs" unless either the -a option or "-t rootfs" is specified.
71 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
72 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
76 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
77 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
79 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
80 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
85 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
86 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
87 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
88 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
89 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
90 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
91 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
92 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
93 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
94 for a patched distribution package.
96 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
97 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
99 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
100 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
101 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
102 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
105 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
109 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
111 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
112 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
113 sha384sum and sha512sum.
117 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
118 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
119 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
120 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
123 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
124 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
126 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
127 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
128 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
129 eventually exits nonzero.
131 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
132 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
133 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
134 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
137 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
138 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
141 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
142 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
145 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
146 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
149 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
150 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
151 Before, this would infloop:
152 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
153 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
155 ** Changes in behavior
157 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
161 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
162 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
163 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
164 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
165 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
168 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
169 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
170 format-changing options.
172 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
173 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
174 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
175 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
176 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
180 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
181 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
182 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
183 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
184 are run without following the instructions in README.
186 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
187 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
188 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
189 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
190 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
191 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
192 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
195 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
199 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
200 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
201 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
202 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
204 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
205 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
206 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
209 sort -u could read freed memory.
210 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
211 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
216 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
217 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
218 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
219 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
226 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
227 processes will not intersperse their output.
228 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
230 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
231 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
232 date: invalid date '\260'
233 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
235 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
236 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
237 lines output by df, can work reliably.
238 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
240 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
241 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
242 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
244 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
245 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
246 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
247 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
248 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
249 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
251 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
254 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
255 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
257 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
258 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
259 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
261 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
262 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
263 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
267 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
269 ** Changes in behavior
271 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
272 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
273 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
274 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
275 have any reason to include it here.
279 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
280 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
281 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
283 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
284 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
285 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
288 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
292 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
293 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
294 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
295 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
296 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
297 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
299 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
300 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
301 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
302 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
303 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
304 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
305 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
307 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
308 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
310 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
311 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
315 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
316 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
318 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
320 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
322 ** Changes in behavior
324 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
325 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
326 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
328 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
329 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
332 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
336 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
337 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
338 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
339 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
340 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
341 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
342 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
343 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
345 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
346 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
347 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
348 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
349 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
351 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
352 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
354 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
355 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
357 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
358 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
360 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
361 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
363 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
364 additional static suffix to output file names.
366 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
367 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
368 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
370 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
371 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
375 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
376 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
377 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
379 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
380 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
381 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
382 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
383 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
384 typically still point to one of the hard links.
386 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
387 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
388 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
389 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
390 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
392 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
393 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
394 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
395 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
399 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
400 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
401 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
403 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
404 instead of causing a usage failure.
406 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
409 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
413 realpath: print resolved file names.
417 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
420 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
423 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
424 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
425 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
426 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
427 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
430 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
431 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
432 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
434 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
435 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
436 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
438 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
439 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
440 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
441 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
444 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
446 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
449 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
450 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
451 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
453 ** Changes in behavior
455 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
456 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
457 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
458 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
459 usually-short referent instead.
461 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
462 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
463 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
464 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
467 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
471 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
472 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
473 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
475 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
478 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
483 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
484 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
486 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
487 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
488 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
489 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
491 ** Changes in behavior
493 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
494 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
495 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
499 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
500 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
501 only .tar.xz files is enough.
504 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
508 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
509 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
510 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
512 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
513 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
515 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
516 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
517 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
518 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
519 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
521 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
522 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
523 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
524 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
525 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
526 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
527 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
528 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
530 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
531 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
533 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
534 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
536 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
539 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
540 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
541 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
543 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
544 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
545 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
548 ** Changes in behavior
550 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
551 when -v or -c specified.
553 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
554 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
558 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
559 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
560 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
561 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
562 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
564 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
565 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
566 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
568 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
569 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
570 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
571 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
572 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
573 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
574 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
576 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
577 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
578 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
582 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
583 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
585 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
588 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
589 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
591 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
592 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
594 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
595 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
597 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
599 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
603 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
604 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
606 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
609 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
613 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
614 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
616 ** Changes in behavior
618 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
619 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
620 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
621 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
622 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
623 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
625 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
626 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
627 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
631 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
634 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
638 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
639 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
642 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
643 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
646 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
647 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
650 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
653 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
656 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
659 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
664 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
665 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
666 processed portion thereof.
668 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
669 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
671 ** Changes in behavior
673 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
674 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
675 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
677 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
678 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
679 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
681 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
682 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
684 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
685 Use --preserve-context instead.
687 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
690 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
694 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
695 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
696 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
697 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
700 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
701 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
703 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
704 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
705 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
707 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
708 reject file names invalid for that file system.
710 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
711 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
715 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
716 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
717 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
718 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
719 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
720 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
721 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
722 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
724 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
725 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
726 the same number of fields are output for each line.
728 ** Changes in behavior
730 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
731 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
732 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
739 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
740 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
741 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
744 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
748 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
749 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
751 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
752 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
754 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
755 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
757 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
758 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
759 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
760 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
762 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
763 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
765 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
766 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
767 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
769 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
771 ** Changes in behavior
773 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
774 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
775 to the number of available processors.
779 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
782 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
786 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
787 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
788 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
789 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
791 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
792 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
793 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
795 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
796 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
798 ** Changes in behavior
800 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
801 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
803 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
804 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
805 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
806 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
807 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
808 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
810 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
811 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
812 the same way as the others.
815 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
819 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
820 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
821 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
823 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
824 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
826 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
827 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
828 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
830 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
833 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
834 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
836 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
837 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
838 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
840 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
841 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
842 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
843 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
847 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
848 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
850 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
853 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
854 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
856 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
858 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
859 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
860 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
862 ** Changes in behavior
864 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
865 rather than its aliased target.
867 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
868 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
869 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
871 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
872 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
873 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
874 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
875 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
876 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
877 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
878 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
880 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
882 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
884 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
885 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
888 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
889 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
890 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
891 control like taskset for example.
893 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
895 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
896 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
897 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
898 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
899 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
900 includes %C when context information is available.
902 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
903 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
904 rather than a file system attribute.
906 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
907 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
908 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
909 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
911 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
912 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
913 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
915 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
916 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
917 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
920 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
924 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
925 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
927 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
929 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
932 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
933 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
934 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
935 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
937 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
938 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
943 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
944 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
946 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
947 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
948 duration after the initial signal was sent.
950 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
951 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
952 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
953 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
954 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
955 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
956 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
957 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
958 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
960 ** Changes in behavior
962 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
963 sequence when it would be a no-op.
965 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
966 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
973 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
974 of available processors, which may not have been the case
975 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
976 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
980 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
981 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
983 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
984 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
985 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
986 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
988 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
989 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
990 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
993 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
997 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
998 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
999 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1001 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1002 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1003 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1005 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1008 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1009 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1010 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1013 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1014 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1017 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1018 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1019 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1020 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1022 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1023 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1024 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1026 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1027 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1028 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1031 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1032 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1035 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1036 processes will not intersperse their output.
1037 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1040 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1044 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1045 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1047 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1050 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1051 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1052 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1053 the presence of the empty string argument.
1054 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1056 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1057 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1058 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1059 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1061 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1062 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1064 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1065 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1066 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1068 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1069 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1070 and with a malicious user on the same system
1071 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1075 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1079 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1080 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1081 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1083 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1084 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1085 offending directory and all "contents."
1087 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1088 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1089 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1091 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1092 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1093 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1095 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1096 processes will not intersperse their output.
1097 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1098 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1100 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1101 output the name of the file to stdout.
1102 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1104 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1105 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1106 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1108 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1109 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1112 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1113 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1114 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1116 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1117 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1118 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1119 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1120 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1121 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1123 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1124 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1125 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1126 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1128 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1129 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1131 ** Changes in behavior
1133 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1134 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1135 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1136 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1137 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1139 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1140 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1141 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1142 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1144 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1146 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1147 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1148 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1149 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1150 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1154 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1158 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1159 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1161 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1162 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1164 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1165 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1166 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1168 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1169 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1172 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1176 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1177 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1178 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1180 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1181 to accommodate leap seconds.
1182 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1184 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1185 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1188 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1190 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1191 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1192 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1194 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1195 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1196 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1197 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1198 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1202 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1203 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1204 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1205 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1207 ** Changes in behavior
1209 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1210 environment variable is set.
1212 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1213 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1214 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1218 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1219 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1220 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1221 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1223 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1224 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1225 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1226 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1230 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1231 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1232 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1234 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1235 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1236 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1237 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1238 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1239 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1240 another improvement:
1242 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1243 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1246 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1250 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1251 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1252 and libraries tested at configure time.
1253 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1255 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1256 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1258 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1259 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1261 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1262 printing a summary to stderr.
1263 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1265 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1266 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1267 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1269 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1270 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1272 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1273 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1274 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1275 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1277 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1278 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1279 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1280 which is relatively unusual.
1281 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1283 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1284 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1285 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1286 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1287 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1288 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1289 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1293 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1294 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1295 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1296 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1297 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1301 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1302 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1304 ** Changes in behavior
1306 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1307 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1308 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1309 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1310 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1313 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1317 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1318 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1320 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1321 before data copying has started.
1323 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1324 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1326 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1327 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1328 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1329 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1331 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1332 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1333 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1334 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1336 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1341 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1342 for its standard streams.
1344 ** Changes in behavior
1346 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1347 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1348 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1349 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1350 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1351 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1353 ** Deprecated options
1355 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1356 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1360 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1362 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1363 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1364 a btrfs file system.
1366 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1368 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1369 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1371 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1372 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1375 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1379 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1380 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1381 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1382 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1384 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1385 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1386 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1387 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1388 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1393 make check: two tests have been corrected
1397 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1398 inherited from gnulib.
1401 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1405 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1406 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1407 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1408 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1410 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1411 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1413 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1415 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1416 systems without xattr support.
1418 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1419 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1420 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1422 ** Changes in behavior
1424 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1425 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1426 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1427 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1429 ** Improved robustness
1431 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1432 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1433 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1434 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1435 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1436 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1437 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1438 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1439 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1443 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1444 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1446 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1447 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1448 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1449 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1450 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1453 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1457 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1458 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1459 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1463 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1464 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1465 data was read, or on process exit.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1468 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1469 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1470 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1471 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1473 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1474 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1475 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1476 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1478 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1479 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1481 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1482 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1484 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1485 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1486 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1488 ** Changes in behavior
1490 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1491 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1492 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1494 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1495 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1497 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1498 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1499 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1502 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1506 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1508 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1509 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1510 install: Never copies xattrs
1512 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1513 from overwriting any existing destination file
1515 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1516 mode where this feature is available.
1518 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1519 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1520 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1521 do not modify the destination at all.
1523 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1525 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1529 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1530 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1532 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1534 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1535 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1537 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1538 processing the first file name
1540 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1541 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1542 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1543 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1545 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1546 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1548 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1549 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1552 ** Changes in behavior
1554 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1555 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1557 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1558 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1559 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1561 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1562 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1564 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1566 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1567 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1568 is still marked with a '+'.
1571 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1575 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1576 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1580 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1581 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1582 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1583 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1584 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1585 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1587 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1588 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1590 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1591 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1593 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1595 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1596 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1597 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1599 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1600 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1602 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1603 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1604 used to factor large numbers.
1606 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1609 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1611 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1613 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1614 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1616 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1617 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1618 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1619 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1621 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1622 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1623 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1625 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1626 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1630 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1632 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1633 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1635 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1636 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1638 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1640 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1641 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1645 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1646 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1647 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1649 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1651 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1652 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1653 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1655 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1656 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1657 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1659 ** Changes in behavior
1661 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1662 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1665 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1669 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1670 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1671 'futimens' system calls.
1675 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1677 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1678 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1679 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1681 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1682 with no USERNAME argument.
1684 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1685 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1686 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1688 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1689 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1690 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1691 number of fields for some inputs.
1693 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1694 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1696 ** Changes in behavior
1698 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1699 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1702 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1706 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1708 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1709 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1710 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1711 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1713 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1714 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1716 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1717 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1719 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1720 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1722 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1723 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1724 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1725 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1727 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1728 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1729 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1730 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1731 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1732 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1734 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1735 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1737 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1738 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1739 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1741 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1742 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1744 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1745 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1747 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1748 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1749 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1750 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1752 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1753 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1755 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1756 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1758 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1759 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1760 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1764 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1765 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1767 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1768 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1769 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1770 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1774 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1775 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1777 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1779 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1783 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1784 which have negative errno values.
1788 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1792 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1796 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1797 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1800 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1804 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1805 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1806 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1808 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1809 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1810 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1811 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1815 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1816 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1817 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1818 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1821 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1825 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1827 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1828 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1829 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1832 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1836 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1837 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1839 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1841 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1843 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1845 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1849 ** Changes in behavior
1851 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1852 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1854 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1855 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1857 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1858 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1859 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1863 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1864 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1865 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1866 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1867 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1868 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1869 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1870 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1871 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1872 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1873 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1875 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1876 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1877 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1880 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1883 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1884 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1885 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1887 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1888 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1889 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1892 ** New build options
1894 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1895 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1896 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1897 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1899 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1900 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1901 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1902 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1903 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1904 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1905 of "make check" fail.
1907 ** Remove deprecated options
1909 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1910 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1911 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1912 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1913 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1915 ** Improved robustness
1917 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1918 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1919 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1920 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1921 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1922 loss of the contents of a/f.
1924 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1925 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1929 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1930 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1931 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1933 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1934 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1935 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1936 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1938 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1939 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1940 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1941 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1942 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1943 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1944 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1945 destination is a symlink.
1947 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1949 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1950 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1952 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1953 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1955 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1957 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1958 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1960 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1961 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1963 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1966 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1967 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1969 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1970 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1972 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1973 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1974 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1975 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1977 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1978 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1979 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1981 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1982 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1983 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1985 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1986 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1987 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1988 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1990 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1991 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1992 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1994 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1995 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1997 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1998 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2000 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2002 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2003 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2004 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2006 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2007 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2009 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2010 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2012 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2013 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2015 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2016 [present in the original version]
2019 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2023 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2025 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2026 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2027 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2029 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2030 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2032 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2036 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2037 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2039 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2040 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2042 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2043 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2045 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2046 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2047 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2048 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2049 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2050 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2052 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2053 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2056 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2057 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2059 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2062 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2063 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2064 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2066 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2067 directory is unreadable.
2069 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2070 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2071 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2073 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2074 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2075 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2076 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2077 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2080 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2081 Before it would print nothing.
2083 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2085 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2086 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2087 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2088 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2089 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2090 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2091 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2092 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2094 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2098 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2099 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2100 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2102 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2103 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2104 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2105 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2108 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2112 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2113 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2114 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2115 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2116 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2117 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2118 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2120 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2121 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2122 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2123 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2124 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2125 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2126 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2127 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2129 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2130 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2131 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2134 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2138 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2139 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2141 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2142 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2143 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2145 ** Improved robustness
2147 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2148 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2149 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2152 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2156 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2157 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2158 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2159 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2160 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2162 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2166 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2169 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2173 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2174 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2175 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2176 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2178 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2179 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2181 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2182 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2183 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2186 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2188 ** Improved robustness
2190 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2191 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2193 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2194 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2195 or NFS-mounted partition.
2197 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2198 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2202 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2203 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2204 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2205 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2206 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2207 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2209 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2210 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2212 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2213 or neglect to report file removal.
2215 For the "groups" command:
2217 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2218 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2220 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2222 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2224 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2228 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2229 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2232 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2234 ** Changes in behavior
2236 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2237 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2238 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2239 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2241 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2242 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2243 a final './' or '../' component.
2245 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2246 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2247 this only for pipes.
2249 ** Infrastructure changes
2251 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2252 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2253 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2254 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2258 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2259 name is "." or "..".
2261 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2262 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2263 dirent.d_type support.
2265 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2266 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2268 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2269 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2270 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2271 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2274 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2276 ** Changes in behavior
2278 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2282 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2283 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2287 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2288 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2289 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2291 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2292 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2294 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2295 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2297 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2299 ** Improved robustness
2301 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2302 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2303 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2305 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2306 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2309 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2310 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2312 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2313 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2315 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2316 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2318 ** Changes in behavior
2320 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2321 where the two are distinct.
2323 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2324 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2325 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2326 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2327 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2328 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2329 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2330 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2331 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2332 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2333 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2334 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2335 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2336 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2337 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2338 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2339 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2341 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2342 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2343 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2345 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2346 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2347 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2348 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2351 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2352 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2356 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2357 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2358 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2359 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2361 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2362 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2363 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2365 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2366 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2367 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2368 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2369 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2372 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2373 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2375 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2376 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2377 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2378 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2380 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2381 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2382 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2384 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2385 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2386 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2387 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2389 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2390 and sticky) with the -m option.
2392 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2393 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2394 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2395 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2396 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2398 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2399 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2401 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2405 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2406 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2407 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2408 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2410 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2412 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2414 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2415 silently ignoring one of them.
2417 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2418 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2419 containing this change was 5.92.
2421 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2422 automatically newline terminated.
2424 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2425 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2426 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2427 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2430 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2431 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2432 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2435 ** Scheduled for removal
2437 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2438 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2440 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2441 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2442 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2443 command to unlink a directory.
2445 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2446 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2447 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2448 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2452 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2453 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2454 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2455 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2456 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2457 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2461 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2462 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2464 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2466 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2467 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2468 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2470 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2471 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2474 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2475 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2477 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2478 list directories before files.
2480 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2481 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2482 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2483 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2486 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2488 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2490 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2491 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2492 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2494 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2495 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2499 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2500 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2501 usually printing nothing.
2503 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2505 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2506 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2507 them with hard-linked directories.
2509 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2510 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2511 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2513 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2514 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2515 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2517 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2520 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2521 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2523 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2524 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2526 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2527 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2529 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2530 all command-line arguments.
2532 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2534 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2536 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2537 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2539 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2541 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2542 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2543 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2544 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2545 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2547 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2548 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2550 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2551 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2552 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2553 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2555 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2557 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2561 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2562 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2564 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2565 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2567 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2568 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2570 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2571 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2573 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2574 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2576 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2578 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2579 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2580 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2583 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2585 ** Build-related bug fixes
2587 installing .mo files would fail
2590 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2594 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2596 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2599 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2603 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2604 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2608 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2610 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2611 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2613 ** Deprecated options
2615 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2616 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2618 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2622 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2624 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2625 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2626 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2627 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2629 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2632 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2638 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2643 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2645 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2647 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2648 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2649 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2651 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2652 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2653 problematic usages. These include:
2655 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2656 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2657 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2658 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2659 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2660 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2661 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2662 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2663 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2665 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2666 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2668 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2669 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2670 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2671 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2673 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2674 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2675 between binary and text files.
2677 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2681 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2685 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2686 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2688 head tac tail tee tr
2689 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2691 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2692 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2694 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2695 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2696 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2698 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2700 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2702 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2703 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2704 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2708 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2710 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2711 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2713 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2714 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2715 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2719 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2720 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2724 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2725 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2726 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2730 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2731 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2735 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2737 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2739 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2743 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2744 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2745 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2747 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2748 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2749 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2750 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2751 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2753 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2757 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2758 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2759 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2761 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2763 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2764 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2765 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2766 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2768 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2770 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2771 rather than silently wrapping around.
2773 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2774 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2776 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2777 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2779 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2780 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2781 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2782 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2784 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2786 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2788 ** Improved robustness
2790 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2791 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2792 no matter how large the result.
2794 ** Improved portability
2796 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2797 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2799 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2801 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2802 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2803 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2805 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2806 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2810 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2811 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2813 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2815 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2816 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2817 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2818 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2820 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2821 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2823 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2824 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2825 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2827 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2829 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2830 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2832 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2833 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2835 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2837 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2838 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2840 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2841 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2843 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2844 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2845 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2847 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2849 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2851 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2855 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2857 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2858 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2859 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2861 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2862 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2864 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2865 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2866 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2868 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2869 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2871 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2872 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2873 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2874 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2876 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2877 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2879 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2880 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2881 the file system does not support it.
2883 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2885 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2886 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2888 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2890 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2891 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2893 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2894 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2895 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2896 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2898 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2899 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2902 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2903 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2904 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2905 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2907 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2908 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2909 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2910 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2912 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2913 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2915 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2917 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2918 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2919 reporting incorrect results.
2923 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2924 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2926 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2929 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2931 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2932 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2934 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2935 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2937 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2940 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2941 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2942 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2943 the file name does not look like a page range.
2945 printf has several changes:
2947 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2948 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2950 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2951 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2952 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2954 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2955 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2958 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2959 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2961 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2962 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2964 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2966 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2967 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2969 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2971 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2973 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2974 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2975 when first encountering the directory.
2979 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2980 output; POSIX requires this.
2982 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2983 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2985 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2987 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2988 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2990 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2991 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2993 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2994 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2995 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2996 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2997 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2998 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2999 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3001 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3002 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3003 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3005 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3006 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3008 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3010 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3012 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3013 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3014 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3015 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3017 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3021 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3022 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3023 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3024 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3025 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3027 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3028 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3029 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3031 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3032 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3034 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3035 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3037 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3038 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3039 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3040 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3041 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3043 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3044 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3046 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3047 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3049 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3051 nocreat do not create the output file
3052 excl fail if the output file already exists
3053 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3054 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3056 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3058 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3059 direct use direct I/O for data
3060 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3061 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3062 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3063 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3064 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3066 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3068 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3069 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3072 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3073 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3074 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3075 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3076 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3077 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3079 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3080 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3082 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3085 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3087 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3089 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3090 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3092 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3093 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3094 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3096 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3097 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3098 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3100 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3102 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3103 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3105 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3106 for compatibility with bash.
3108 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3110 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3111 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3112 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3113 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3115 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3116 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3118 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3119 ls supports TABSIZE.
3120 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3121 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3122 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3124 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3127 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3129 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3130 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3131 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3132 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3133 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3134 an offset, not as a file name.
3136 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3137 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3139 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3140 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3142 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3143 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3145 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3146 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3147 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3149 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3150 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3152 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3153 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3157 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3159 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3161 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3165 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3166 or more arguments between partitions.
3168 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3169 holes in the destination.
3171 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3172 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3173 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3174 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3175 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3176 terminates immediately.
3178 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3180 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3182 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3183 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3184 not the empty string.
3186 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3187 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3191 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3192 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3193 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3196 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3203 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3207 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3208 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3210 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3211 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3213 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3214 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3215 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3218 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3222 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3223 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3225 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3226 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3228 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3229 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3230 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3232 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3234 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3237 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3239 ** Configuration option
3241 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3242 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3246 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3247 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3251 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3252 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3253 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3256 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3257 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3258 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3259 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3260 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3261 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3262 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3265 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3269 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3270 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3271 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3273 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3274 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3276 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3278 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3279 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3280 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3281 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3283 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3285 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3286 not just the ones that reference directories
3288 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3289 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3291 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3292 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3293 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3295 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3296 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3297 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3298 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3299 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3300 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3302 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3307 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3308 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3310 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3312 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3314 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3316 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3317 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3319 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3320 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3322 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3324 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3328 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3330 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3332 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3333 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3334 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3335 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3336 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3338 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3339 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3341 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3342 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3344 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3345 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3347 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3348 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3349 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3353 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3354 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3355 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3356 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3357 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3358 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3359 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3360 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3361 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3362 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3363 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3364 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3365 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3366 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3368 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3370 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3371 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3373 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3375 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3377 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3378 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3380 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3382 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3383 without a trailing newline.
3385 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3386 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3388 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3391 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3395 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3397 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3399 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3400 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3401 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3402 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3404 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3406 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3407 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3408 be printed without leading spaces.
3410 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3411 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3416 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3417 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3418 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3420 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3422 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3423 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3425 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3426 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3428 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3429 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3431 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3433 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3435 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3437 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3438 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3440 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3442 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3444 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3445 byte offsets are specified.
3448 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3451 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3454 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3455 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3456 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3457 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3458 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3459 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3460 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3461 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3462 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3463 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3464 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3465 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3466 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3467 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3468 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3469 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3470 directory where M has write access.
3471 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3472 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3473 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3476 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3477 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3478 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3479 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3480 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3481 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3482 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3483 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3484 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3485 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3486 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3487 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3488 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3489 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3490 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3491 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3492 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3493 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3494 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3495 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3496 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3497 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3498 appeared one additional time.
3500 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3501 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3502 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3503 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3506 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3507 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3508 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3509 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3510 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3511 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3512 if there were more than 338.
3514 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3515 - false --help now exits nonzero
3518 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3519 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3520 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3521 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3524 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3525 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3526 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3527 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3528 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3531 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3532 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3533 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3534 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3535 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3536 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3537 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3540 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3541 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3542 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3543 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3544 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3545 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3547 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3548 under certain unusual conditions
3549 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3550 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3553 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3554 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3555 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3556 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3557 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3558 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3559 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3560 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3561 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3562 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3563 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3564 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3565 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3566 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3567 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3568 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3571 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3572 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3575 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3576 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3577 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3578 involving hard-linked directories
3579 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3580 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3581 character-special and block files
3584 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3585 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3586 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3587 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3588 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3589 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3590 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3591 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3592 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3594 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3595 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3596 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3597 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3598 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3599 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3600 specified on the command line.
3601 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3602 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3603 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3604 the first file untouched.
3605 * readlink: new program
3606 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3607 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3608 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3609 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3610 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3611 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3614 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3615 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3616 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3617 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3618 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3619 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3620 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3621 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3622 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3623 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3624 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3625 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3627 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3628 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3629 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3631 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3632 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3633 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3634 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3635 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3636 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3637 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3638 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3641 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3642 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3645 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3646 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3647 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3648 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3649 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3650 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3651 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3654 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3655 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3657 ========================================================================
3658 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3659 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3662 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3664 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3665 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3666 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3667 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3668 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3669 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3670 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3671 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3672 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3673 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3674 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3675 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3677 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3678 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3679 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3680 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3682 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3685 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3687 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3688 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3689 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3690 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3691 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3692 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3693 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3696 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3697 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3698 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3699 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3700 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3701 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3702 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3703 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3704 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3705 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3706 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3707 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3708 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3709 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3710 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3711 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3713 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3714 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3716 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3717 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3718 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3719 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3720 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3721 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3723 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3724 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3725 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3726 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3727 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3728 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3729 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3731 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3732 the source files in the following example:
3733 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3734 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3735 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3736 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3737 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3738 links between source files with --preserve=links
3739 * cp accepts new options:
3740 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3741 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3742 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3743 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3744 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3745 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3746 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3747 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3748 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3750 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3751 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3752 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3753 even though it's older than dest.
3754 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3755 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3756 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3757 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3758 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3760 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3761 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3762 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3763 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3764 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3765 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3766 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3768 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3769 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3770 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3772 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3773 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3774 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3775 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3776 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3777 This is the default.
3779 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3780 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3781 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3782 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3783 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3785 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3788 ========================================================================
3789 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3790 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3793 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3794 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3796 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3797 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3798 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3799 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3800 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3802 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3803 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3804 that specifies a non-directory
3807 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3808 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3809 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3810 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3811 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3812 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3813 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3814 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3815 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3816 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3817 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3818 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3819 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3820 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3821 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3822 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3823 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3824 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3825 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3826 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3827 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3828 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3829 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3830 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3832 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3833 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3834 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3836 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3838 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3839 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3841 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3842 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3843 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3844 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3845 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3847 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3848 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3849 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3850 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3851 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3853 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3855 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3856 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3857 * still more portability fixes
3858 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3859 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3861 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3863 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3865 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3867 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3868 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3869 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3870 there is any time remaining
3871 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3873 ========================================================================
3874 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3875 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3877 This package began as the union of the following:
3878 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3880 ========================================================================
3882 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3884 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3885 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3886 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3887 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3888 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3889 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.