1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
8 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
9 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
13 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
14 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
15 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
16 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
18 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
19 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
20 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
21 now fails instead of losing the data.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
25 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
26 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
28 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
29 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
32 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
33 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
36 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
37 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
40 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
41 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
42 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
44 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
45 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
46 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
48 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
51 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
52 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
55 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
56 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
58 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
59 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
60 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
61 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
63 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
64 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
65 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
67 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
68 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
71 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
72 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
76 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
77 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
78 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
80 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
81 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
83 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
87 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
89 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
90 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
92 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
93 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
94 is effective in this case.
97 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
101 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
102 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
103 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
105 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
106 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
109 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
110 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
111 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
113 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
114 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
117 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
118 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
119 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
121 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
122 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
123 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
124 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
125 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
127 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
128 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
129 depending on the size of the first file processed.
130 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
134 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
135 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
136 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
137 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
139 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
140 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
141 time zone is indeterminate.
143 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
144 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
145 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
146 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
148 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
149 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
150 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
152 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
153 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
155 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
156 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
157 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
161 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
162 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
163 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
166 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
170 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
171 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
174 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
175 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
178 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
179 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
180 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
181 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
182 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
184 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
185 System V style platforms where this information is available only
186 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
188 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
191 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
192 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
195 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
196 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
197 defaults to a different SELinux context.
199 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
202 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
203 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
204 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
206 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
207 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
209 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
210 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
211 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
213 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
215 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
216 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
218 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
219 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
221 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
222 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
224 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
227 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
228 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
229 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
230 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
232 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
233 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
234 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
236 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
237 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
238 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
240 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
241 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
244 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
245 only doing so if --retry is specified.
246 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
248 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
249 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
251 ** Changes in behavior
253 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
255 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
256 values for any argument.
258 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
259 they are out of localtime range.
261 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
262 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
263 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
264 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
268 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
269 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
270 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
272 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
273 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
275 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
276 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
278 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
280 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
281 written to a terminal.
283 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
284 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
286 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
287 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
288 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
289 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
290 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
291 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
292 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
293 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
294 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
295 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
296 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
298 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
299 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
303 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
304 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
308 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
310 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
311 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
313 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
320 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
321 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
322 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
325 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
328 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
329 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
332 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
335 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
336 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
339 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
342 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
343 that specify an offset for the first field.
344 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
346 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
351 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
352 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
356 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
357 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
359 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
360 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
361 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
362 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
363 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
365 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
366 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
367 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
369 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
370 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
371 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
373 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
374 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
376 ** Changes in behavior
378 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
379 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
381 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
382 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
384 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
385 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
387 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
388 when outputting to a terminal.
390 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
394 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
395 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
397 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
398 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
400 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
401 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
402 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
404 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
405 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
407 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
408 upon detection of a directory cycle.
409 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
411 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
413 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
414 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
415 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
417 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
418 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
421 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
425 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
426 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
428 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
431 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
432 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
435 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
436 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
437 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
438 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
440 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
441 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
442 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
443 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
445 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
446 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
448 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
449 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
451 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
452 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
453 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
455 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
456 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
457 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
459 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
460 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
461 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
463 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
464 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
465 character at the 4GiB position.
466 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
468 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
469 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
471 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
472 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
474 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
475 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
478 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
481 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
482 replaced before inotify watches were created.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
485 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
486 [bug introduced in the beginning]
488 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
489 when those files are being created or renamed.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
494 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
495 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
496 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
497 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
499 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
500 on stderr approximately every second.
502 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
503 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
505 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
506 other than the default newline character.
508 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
509 a useful setting with high latency links.
511 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
512 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
514 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
515 and output errors in general.
517 ** Changes in behavior
519 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
520 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
521 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
522 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
524 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
525 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
526 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
527 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
528 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
530 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
531 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
533 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
535 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
536 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
538 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
539 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
543 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
544 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
546 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
547 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
549 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
550 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
552 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
553 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
555 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
557 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
558 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
559 documentation are provided.
562 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
566 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
569 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
570 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
571 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
572 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
574 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
575 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
576 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
579 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
580 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
582 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
583 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
585 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
586 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
587 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
588 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
589 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
590 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
604 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
606 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
607 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
608 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
609 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
610 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
611 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
613 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
614 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
615 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
618 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
619 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
620 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
622 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
623 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
624 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
627 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
628 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
629 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
631 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
632 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
633 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
635 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
636 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
637 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
638 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
641 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
642 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
645 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
646 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
648 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
649 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
650 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
652 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
653 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
655 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
656 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
658 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
659 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
661 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
662 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
664 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
665 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
666 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
668 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
669 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
673 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
674 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
676 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
677 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
678 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
679 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
680 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
681 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
682 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
683 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
684 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
685 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
686 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
687 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
688 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
689 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
690 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
691 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
692 it suitable for embedded system.
694 ** Changes in behavior
696 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
697 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
699 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
700 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
702 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
703 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
704 will result in the delayed output of lines.
706 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
707 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
708 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
712 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
713 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
714 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
716 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
718 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
719 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
720 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
722 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
723 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
724 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
725 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
727 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
728 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
730 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
731 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
732 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
739 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
740 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
741 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
743 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
744 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
745 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
746 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
748 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
749 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
750 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
752 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
753 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
755 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
757 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
758 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
759 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
761 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
762 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
763 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
765 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
766 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
767 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
768 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
770 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
771 from the source, when copying across file systems.
772 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
774 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
775 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
776 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
778 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
779 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
781 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
782 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
783 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
784 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
786 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
787 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
788 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
790 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
791 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
792 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
796 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
797 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
798 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
800 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
801 used to identify the split points.
803 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
804 command line argument through to the output.
806 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
809 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
810 a NUL instead of a white space character.
812 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
813 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
815 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
817 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
818 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
819 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
821 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
822 unique groups with empty lines.
824 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
825 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
827 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
830 ** Changes in behavior
832 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
833 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
834 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
835 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
837 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
838 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
840 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
841 not just the transfer counts.
843 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
845 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
846 as per the documented interface.
850 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
852 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
853 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
854 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
855 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
857 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
858 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
859 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
860 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
862 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
863 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
864 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
866 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
867 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
869 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
870 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
872 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
876 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
879 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
883 numfmt: reformat numbers
887 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
888 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
889 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
891 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
892 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
893 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
895 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
896 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
900 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
903 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
904 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
907 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
908 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
909 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
911 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
912 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
913 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
915 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
916 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
917 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
919 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
920 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
921 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
923 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
924 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
926 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
927 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
929 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
930 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
931 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
933 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
934 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
935 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
937 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
938 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
939 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
941 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
942 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
943 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
944 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
946 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
947 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
948 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
950 ** Changes in behavior
952 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
953 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
954 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
955 'total' in the target column.
957 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
958 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
959 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
961 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
962 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
964 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
965 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
969 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
970 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
972 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
973 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
975 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
979 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
980 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
981 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
982 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
983 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
984 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
985 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
986 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
987 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
988 for a patched distribution package.
990 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
991 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
993 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
994 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
995 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
996 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
999 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1003 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1005 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1006 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1007 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1011 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1012 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1013 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1014 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1017 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1018 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1020 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1021 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1022 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1023 eventually exits nonzero.
1025 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1026 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1027 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1028 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1031 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1032 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1035 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1036 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1037 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1039 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1040 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1043 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1044 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1045 Before, this would infloop:
1046 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1047 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1049 ** Changes in behavior
1051 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1055 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1056 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1057 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1058 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1059 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1062 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1063 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1064 format-changing options.
1066 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1067 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1068 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1069 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1070 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1074 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1075 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1076 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1077 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1078 are run without following the instructions in README.
1080 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1081 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1082 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1083 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1084 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1085 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1086 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1089 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1093 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1094 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1095 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1096 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1098 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1099 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1100 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1103 sort -u could read freed memory.
1104 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1105 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1110 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1111 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1112 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1113 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1120 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1121 processes will not intersperse their output.
1122 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1124 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1125 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1126 date: invalid date '\260'
1127 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1129 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1130 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1131 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1132 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1134 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1135 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1136 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1138 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1139 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1140 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1141 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1142 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1145 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1148 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1149 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1151 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1152 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1153 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1155 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1156 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1157 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1161 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1163 ** Changes in behavior
1165 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1166 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1167 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1168 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1169 have any reason to include it here.
1173 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1174 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1175 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1177 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1178 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1179 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1186 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1187 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1188 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1189 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1190 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1191 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1193 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1194 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1195 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1196 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1197 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1198 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1199 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1201 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1202 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1204 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1205 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1209 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1210 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1212 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1214 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1216 ** Changes in behavior
1218 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1219 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1220 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1222 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1223 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1226 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1230 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1231 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1232 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1233 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1234 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1235 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1236 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1237 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1239 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1240 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1241 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1242 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1243 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1245 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1246 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1248 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1249 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1251 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1252 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1254 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1255 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1257 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1258 additional static suffix to output file names.
1260 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1261 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1262 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1264 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1265 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1269 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1270 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1273 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1274 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1275 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1276 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1277 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1278 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1280 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1281 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1282 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1283 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1284 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1286 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1287 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1288 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1289 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1293 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1294 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1295 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1297 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1298 instead of causing a usage failure.
1300 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1303 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1307 realpath: print resolved file names.
1311 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1312 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1314 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1315 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1317 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1318 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1319 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1320 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1321 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1322 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1324 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1325 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1326 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1328 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1329 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1332 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1333 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1334 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1335 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1338 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1340 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1343 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1344 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1345 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1347 ** Changes in behavior
1349 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1350 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1351 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1352 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1353 usually-short referent instead.
1355 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1356 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1357 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1358 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1365 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1366 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1367 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1369 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1370 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1372 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1377 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1378 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1380 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1381 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1382 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1383 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1385 ** Changes in behavior
1387 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1388 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1389 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1393 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1394 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1395 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1398 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1402 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1403 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1404 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1406 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1407 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1409 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1410 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1411 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1412 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1413 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1415 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1416 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1417 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1418 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1419 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1420 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1421 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1422 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1424 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1425 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1427 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1428 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1430 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1431 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1433 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1434 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1435 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1437 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1438 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1439 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1440 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1442 ** Changes in behavior
1444 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1445 when -v or -c specified.
1447 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1448 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1452 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1453 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1454 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1455 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1456 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1458 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1459 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1460 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1462 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1463 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1464 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1465 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1466 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1467 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1468 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1470 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1471 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1472 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1476 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1477 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1479 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1482 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1483 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1485 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1486 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1488 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1489 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1491 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1493 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1497 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1498 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1500 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1503 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1507 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1508 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1510 ** Changes in behavior
1512 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1513 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1514 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1515 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1516 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1517 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1518 resolved for 2.6.39.
1519 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1520 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1521 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1525 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1528 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1532 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1533 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1534 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1536 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1537 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1540 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1541 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1542 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1544 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1545 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1547 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1550 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1553 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1554 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1558 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1559 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1560 processed portion thereof.
1562 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1563 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1565 ** Changes in behavior
1567 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1568 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1569 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1571 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1572 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1573 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1575 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1576 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1578 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1579 Use --preserve-context instead.
1581 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1584 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1588 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1589 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1590 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1591 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1592 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1594 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1595 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1597 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1598 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1599 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1601 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1602 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1604 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1605 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1609 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1610 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1611 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1612 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1613 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1614 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1615 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1616 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1618 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1619 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1620 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1622 ** Changes in behavior
1624 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1625 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1626 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1629 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1633 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1634 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1635 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1638 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1642 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1643 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1645 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1646 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1648 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1649 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1651 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1652 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1653 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1656 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1657 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1659 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1660 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1661 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1663 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1665 ** Changes in behavior
1667 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1668 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1669 to the number of available processors.
1673 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1676 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1680 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1681 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1682 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1683 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1685 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1686 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1687 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1689 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1690 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1692 ** Changes in behavior
1694 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1695 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1697 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1698 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1699 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1700 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1701 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1702 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1704 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1705 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1706 the same way as the others.
1708 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1709 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1712 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1716 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1717 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1718 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1720 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1721 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1723 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1724 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1725 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1727 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1728 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1730 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1731 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1733 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1734 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1735 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1737 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1738 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1739 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1740 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1744 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1745 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1747 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1750 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1751 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1753 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1755 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1756 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1757 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1759 ** Changes in behavior
1761 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1762 rather than its aliased target.
1764 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1765 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1766 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1768 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1769 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1770 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1771 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1772 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1773 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1774 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1775 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1777 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1779 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1781 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1782 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1785 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1786 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1787 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1788 control like taskset for example.
1790 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1792 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1793 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1794 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1795 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1796 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1797 includes %C when context information is available.
1799 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1800 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1801 rather than a file system attribute.
1803 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1804 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1805 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1806 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1808 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1809 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1810 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1812 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1813 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1814 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1821 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1822 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1824 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1826 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1827 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1829 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1830 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1831 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1832 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1834 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1835 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1836 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1840 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1841 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1843 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1844 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1845 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1847 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1848 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1849 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1850 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1851 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1852 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1853 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1854 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1855 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1857 ** Changes in behavior
1859 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1860 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1862 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1863 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1866 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1870 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1871 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1872 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1873 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1877 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1878 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1880 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1881 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1882 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1883 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1885 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1886 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1887 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1890 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1894 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1895 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1896 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1898 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1899 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1900 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1902 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1903 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1905 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1906 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1907 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1910 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1911 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1912 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1914 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1915 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1916 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1917 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1919 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1920 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1921 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1923 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1924 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1925 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1926 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1928 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1929 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1932 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1933 processes will not intersperse their output.
1934 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1937 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1941 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1942 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1944 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1945 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1947 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1948 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1949 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1950 the presence of the empty string argument.
1951 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1953 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1954 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1955 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1956 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1958 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1959 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1961 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1962 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1963 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1965 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1966 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1967 and with a malicious user on the same system
1968 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1972 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1976 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1977 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1980 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1981 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1982 offending directory and all "contents."
1984 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1985 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1986 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1988 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1989 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1990 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1992 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1993 processes will not intersperse their output.
1994 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1995 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1997 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1998 output the name of the file to stdout.
1999 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2001 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2002 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2003 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2005 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2006 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2009 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2010 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2011 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2013 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2014 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2015 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2016 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2017 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2018 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2020 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2021 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2022 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2023 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2025 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2026 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2028 ** Changes in behavior
2030 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2031 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2032 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2033 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2034 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2036 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2037 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2038 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2039 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2041 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2043 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2044 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2045 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2046 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2047 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2051 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2055 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2056 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2058 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2059 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2061 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2062 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2063 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2065 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2066 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2069 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2073 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2074 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2075 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2077 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2078 to accommodate leap seconds.
2079 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2081 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2082 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2083 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2085 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2087 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2088 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2089 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2091 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2092 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2093 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2094 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2095 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2099 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2100 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2101 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2102 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2104 ** Changes in behavior
2106 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2107 environment variable is set.
2109 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2110 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2111 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2115 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2116 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2117 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2118 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2120 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2121 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2122 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2123 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2127 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2128 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2129 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2131 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2132 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2133 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2134 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2135 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2136 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2137 another improvement:
2139 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2140 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2143 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2147 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2148 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2149 and libraries tested at configure time.
2150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2152 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2153 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2155 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2156 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2158 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2159 printing a summary to stderr.
2160 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2162 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2163 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2164 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2166 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2169 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2170 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2171 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2172 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2174 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2175 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2176 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2177 which is relatively unusual.
2178 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2180 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2181 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2182 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2183 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2184 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2185 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2186 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2190 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2191 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2192 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2193 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2194 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2198 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2199 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2201 ** Changes in behavior
2203 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2204 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2205 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2206 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2207 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2210 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2214 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2215 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2217 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2218 before data copying has started.
2220 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2221 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2223 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2224 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2225 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2226 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2228 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2229 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2230 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2231 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2233 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2238 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2239 for its standard streams.
2241 ** Changes in behavior
2243 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2244 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2245 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2246 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2247 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2248 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2250 ** Deprecated options
2252 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2253 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2257 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2259 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2260 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2261 a btrfs file system.
2263 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2265 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2266 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2268 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2269 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2272 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2276 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2277 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2278 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2279 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2281 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2282 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2283 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2284 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2285 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2290 make check: two tests have been corrected
2294 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2295 inherited from gnulib.
2298 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2302 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2303 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2304 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2305 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2307 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2308 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2310 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2312 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2313 systems without xattr support.
2315 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2316 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2317 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2319 ** Changes in behavior
2321 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2322 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2323 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2324 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2326 ** Improved robustness
2328 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2329 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2330 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2331 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2332 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2333 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2334 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2335 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2336 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2340 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2341 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2343 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2344 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2345 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2346 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2347 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2350 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2354 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2355 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2356 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2360 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2361 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2362 data was read, or on process exit.
2363 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2365 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2366 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2367 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2368 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2370 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2371 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2372 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2373 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2375 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2376 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2378 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2379 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2381 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2382 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2383 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2385 ** Changes in behavior
2387 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2388 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2389 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2391 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2392 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2394 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2395 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2396 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2399 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2403 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2405 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2406 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2407 install: Never copies xattrs
2409 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2410 from overwriting any existing destination file
2412 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2413 mode where this feature is available.
2415 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2416 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2417 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2418 do not modify the destination at all.
2420 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2422 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2426 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2427 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2429 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2431 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2432 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2434 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2435 processing the first file name
2437 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2438 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2439 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2440 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2442 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2443 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2445 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2446 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2449 ** Changes in behavior
2451 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2452 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2454 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2455 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2456 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2458 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2459 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2461 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2463 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2464 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2465 is still marked with a '+'.
2468 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2472 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2473 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2477 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2478 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2479 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2480 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2481 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2482 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2484 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2485 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2487 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2488 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2490 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2492 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2493 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2494 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2496 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2497 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2499 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2500 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2501 used to factor large numbers.
2503 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2506 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2508 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2510 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2511 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2513 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2514 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2515 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2516 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2518 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2519 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2520 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2522 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2523 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2527 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2529 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2530 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2532 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2533 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2535 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2537 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2538 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2542 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2543 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2544 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2546 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2548 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2549 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2550 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2552 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2553 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2554 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2556 ** Changes in behavior
2558 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2559 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2562 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2566 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2567 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2568 'futimens' system calls.
2572 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2574 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2575 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2576 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2578 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2579 with no USERNAME argument.
2581 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2582 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2583 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2585 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2586 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2587 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2588 number of fields for some inputs.
2590 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2591 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2593 ** Changes in behavior
2595 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2596 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2599 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2603 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2605 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2606 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2607 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2608 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2610 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2611 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2613 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2614 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2616 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2617 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2619 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2620 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2621 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2622 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2624 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2625 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2626 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2627 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2628 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2629 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2631 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2632 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2634 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2635 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2636 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2638 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2639 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2641 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2642 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2644 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2645 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2646 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2647 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2649 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2650 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2652 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2653 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2655 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2656 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2661 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2662 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2664 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2665 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2666 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2667 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2671 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2672 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2674 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2676 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2680 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2681 which have negative errno values.
2685 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2689 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2693 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2694 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2697 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2701 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2702 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2703 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2705 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2706 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2707 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2708 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2712 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2713 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2714 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2715 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2722 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2724 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2725 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2726 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2729 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2733 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2734 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2736 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2738 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2740 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2742 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2746 ** Changes in behavior
2748 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2749 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2751 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2752 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2754 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2755 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2756 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2760 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2761 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2762 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2763 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2764 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2765 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2766 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2767 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2768 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2769 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2770 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2772 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2773 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2774 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2777 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2780 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2781 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2782 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2784 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2785 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2786 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2789 ** New build options
2791 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2792 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2793 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2794 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2796 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2797 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2798 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2799 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2800 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2801 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2802 of "make check" fail.
2804 ** Remove deprecated options
2806 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2807 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2808 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2809 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2810 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2812 ** Improved robustness
2814 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2815 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2816 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2817 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2818 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2819 loss of the contents of a/f.
2821 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2822 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2826 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2827 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2828 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2830 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2831 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2832 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2833 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2835 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2836 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2837 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2838 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2839 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2840 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2841 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2842 destination is a symlink.
2844 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2846 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2847 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2849 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2850 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2852 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2854 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2855 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2857 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2858 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2860 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2863 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2864 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2866 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2867 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2869 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2870 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2871 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2872 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2874 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2875 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2876 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2878 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2879 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2880 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2882 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2883 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2884 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2885 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2887 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2888 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2889 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2891 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2892 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2894 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2895 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2897 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2899 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2900 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2901 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2903 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2904 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2906 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2907 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2909 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2910 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2912 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2913 [present in the original version]
2916 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2920 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2922 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2923 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2924 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2926 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2927 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2929 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2933 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2934 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2936 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2937 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2939 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2940 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2942 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2943 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2944 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2945 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2946 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2947 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2949 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2950 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2953 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2954 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2956 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2959 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2960 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2961 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2963 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2964 directory is unreadable.
2966 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2967 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2968 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2970 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2971 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2972 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2973 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2974 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2977 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2978 Before it would print nothing.
2980 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2982 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2983 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2984 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2985 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2986 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2987 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2988 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2989 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2991 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2995 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2996 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2997 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2999 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3000 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3001 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3002 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3005 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3009 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3010 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3011 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3012 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3013 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3014 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3015 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3017 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3018 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3019 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3020 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3021 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3022 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3023 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3024 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3026 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3027 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3028 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3031 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3035 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3036 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3038 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3039 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3040 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3042 ** Improved robustness
3044 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3045 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3046 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3049 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3053 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3054 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3055 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3056 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3057 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3059 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3063 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3066 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3070 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3071 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3072 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3073 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3075 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3076 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3078 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3079 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3080 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3083 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3085 ** Improved robustness
3087 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3088 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3090 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3091 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3092 or NFS-mounted partition.
3094 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3095 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3099 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3100 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3101 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3102 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3103 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3104 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3106 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3107 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3109 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3110 or neglect to report file removal.
3112 For the "groups" command:
3114 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3115 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3117 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3119 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3121 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3125 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3126 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3129 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3131 ** Changes in behavior
3133 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3134 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3135 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3136 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3138 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3139 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3140 a final './' or '../' component.
3142 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3143 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3144 this only for pipes.
3146 ** Infrastructure changes
3148 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3149 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3150 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3151 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3155 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3156 name is "." or "..".
3158 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3159 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3160 dirent.d_type support.
3162 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3163 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3165 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3166 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3167 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3168 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3171 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3173 ** Changes in behavior
3175 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3179 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3180 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3184 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3185 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3186 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3188 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3189 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3191 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3192 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3194 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3196 ** Improved robustness
3198 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3199 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3200 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3202 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3203 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3206 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3207 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3209 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3210 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3212 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3213 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3215 ** Changes in behavior
3217 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3218 where the two are distinct.
3220 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3221 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3222 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3223 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3224 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3225 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3226 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3227 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3228 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3229 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3230 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3231 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3232 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3233 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3234 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3235 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3236 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3238 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3239 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3240 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3242 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3243 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3244 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3245 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3248 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3249 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3253 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3254 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3255 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3256 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3258 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3259 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3260 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3262 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3263 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3264 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3265 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3266 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3269 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3270 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3272 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3273 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3274 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3275 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3277 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3278 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3279 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3281 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3282 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3283 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3284 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3286 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3287 and sticky) with the -m option.
3289 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3290 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3291 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3292 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3293 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3295 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3296 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3298 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3302 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3303 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3304 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3305 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3307 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3309 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3311 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3312 silently ignoring one of them.
3314 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3315 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3316 containing this change was 5.92.
3318 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3319 automatically newline terminated.
3321 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3322 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3323 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3324 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3327 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3328 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3329 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3332 ** Scheduled for removal
3334 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3335 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3337 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3338 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3339 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3340 command to unlink a directory.
3342 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3343 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3344 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3345 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3349 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3350 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3351 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3352 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3353 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3354 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3358 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3359 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3361 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3363 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3364 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3365 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3367 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3368 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3371 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3372 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3374 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3375 list directories before files.
3377 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3378 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3379 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3380 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3383 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3385 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3387 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3388 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3389 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3391 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3392 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3396 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3397 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3398 usually printing nothing.
3400 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3402 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3403 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3404 them with hard-linked directories.
3406 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3407 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3408 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3410 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3411 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3412 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3414 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3417 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3418 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3420 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3421 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3423 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3424 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3426 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3427 all command-line arguments.
3429 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3431 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3433 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3434 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3436 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3438 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3439 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3440 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3441 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3442 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3444 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3445 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3447 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3448 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3449 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3450 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3452 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3454 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3458 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3459 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3461 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3462 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3464 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3465 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3467 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3468 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3470 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3471 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3473 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3475 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3476 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3477 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3480 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3482 ** Build-related bug fixes
3484 installing .mo files would fail
3487 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3491 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3493 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3496 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3500 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3501 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3505 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3507 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3508 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3510 ** Deprecated options
3512 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3513 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3515 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3519 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3521 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3522 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3523 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3524 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3526 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3529 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3535 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3540 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3542 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3544 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3545 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3546 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3548 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3549 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3550 problematic usages. These include:
3552 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3553 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3554 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3555 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3556 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3557 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3558 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3559 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3560 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3562 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3563 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3565 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3566 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3567 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3568 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3570 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3571 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3572 between binary and text files.
3574 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3578 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3582 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3583 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3585 head tac tail tee tr
3586 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3588 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3589 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3591 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3592 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3593 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3595 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3597 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3599 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3600 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3601 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3605 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3607 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3608 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3610 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3611 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3612 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3616 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3617 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3621 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3622 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3623 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3627 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3628 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3632 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3634 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3636 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3640 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3641 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3642 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3644 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3645 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3646 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3647 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3648 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3650 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3654 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3655 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3656 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3658 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3660 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3661 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3662 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3663 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3665 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3667 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3668 rather than silently wrapping around.
3670 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3671 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3673 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3674 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3676 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3677 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3678 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3679 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3681 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3683 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3685 ** Improved robustness
3687 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3688 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3689 no matter how large the result.
3691 ** Improved portability
3693 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3694 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3696 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3698 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3699 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3700 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3702 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3703 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3707 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3708 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3710 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3712 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3713 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3714 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3715 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3717 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3718 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3720 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3721 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3722 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3724 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3726 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3727 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3729 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3730 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3732 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3734 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3735 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3737 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3738 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3740 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3741 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3742 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3744 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3746 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3748 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3752 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3754 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3755 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3756 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3758 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3759 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3761 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3762 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3763 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3765 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3766 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3768 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3769 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3770 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3771 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3773 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3774 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3776 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3777 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3778 the file system does not support it.
3780 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3782 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3783 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3785 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3787 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3788 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3790 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3791 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3792 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3793 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3795 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3796 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3799 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3800 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3801 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3802 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3804 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3805 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3806 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3807 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3809 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3810 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3812 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3814 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3815 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3816 reporting incorrect results.
3820 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3821 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3823 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3826 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3828 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3829 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3831 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3832 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3834 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3837 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3838 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3839 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3840 the file name does not look like a page range.
3842 printf has several changes:
3844 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3845 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3847 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3848 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3849 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3851 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3852 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3855 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3856 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3858 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3859 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3861 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3863 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3864 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3866 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3868 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3870 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3871 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3872 when first encountering the directory.
3876 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3877 output; POSIX requires this.
3879 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3880 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3882 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3884 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3885 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3887 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3888 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3890 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3891 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3892 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3893 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3894 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3895 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3896 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3898 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3899 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3900 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3902 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3903 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3905 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3907 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3909 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3910 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3911 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3912 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3914 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3918 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3919 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3920 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3921 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3922 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3924 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3925 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3926 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3928 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3929 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3931 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3932 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3934 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3935 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3936 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3937 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3938 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3940 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3941 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3943 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3944 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3946 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3948 nocreat do not create the output file
3949 excl fail if the output file already exists
3950 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3951 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3953 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3955 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3956 direct use direct I/O for data
3957 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3958 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3959 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3960 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3961 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3963 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3965 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3966 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3969 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3970 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3971 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3972 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3973 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3974 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3976 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3977 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3979 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3982 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3984 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3986 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3987 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3989 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3990 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3991 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3993 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3994 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3995 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3997 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3999 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4000 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4002 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4003 for compatibility with bash.
4005 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4007 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4008 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4009 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4010 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4012 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4013 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4015 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4016 ls supports TABSIZE.
4017 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4018 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4019 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4021 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4024 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4026 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4027 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4028 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4029 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4030 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4031 an offset, not as a file name.
4033 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4034 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4036 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4037 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4039 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4040 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4042 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4043 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4044 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4046 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4047 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4049 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4050 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4054 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4056 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4058 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4062 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4063 or more arguments between partitions.
4065 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4066 holes in the destination.
4068 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4069 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4070 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4071 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4072 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4073 terminates immediately.
4075 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4077 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4079 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4080 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4081 not the empty string.
4083 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4084 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4088 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4089 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4090 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4093 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4100 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4104 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4105 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4107 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4108 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4110 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4111 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4112 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4115 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4119 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4120 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4122 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4123 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4125 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4126 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4127 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4129 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4131 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4134 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4136 ** Configuration option
4138 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4139 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4143 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4144 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4148 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4149 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4150 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4153 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4154 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4155 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4156 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4157 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4158 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4159 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4162 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4166 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4167 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4168 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4170 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4171 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4173 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4175 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4176 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4177 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4178 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4180 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4182 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4183 not just the ones that reference directories
4185 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4186 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4188 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4189 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4190 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4192 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4193 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4194 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4195 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4196 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4197 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4199 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4204 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4205 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4207 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4209 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4211 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4213 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4214 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4216 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4217 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4219 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4221 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4225 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4227 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4229 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4230 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4231 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4232 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4233 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4235 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4236 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4238 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4239 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4241 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4242 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4244 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4245 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4246 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4250 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4251 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4252 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4253 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4254 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4255 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4256 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4257 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4258 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4259 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4260 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4261 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4262 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4263 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4265 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4267 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4268 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4270 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4272 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4274 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4275 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4277 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4279 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4280 without a trailing newline.
4282 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4283 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4285 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4288 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4292 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4294 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4296 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4297 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4298 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4299 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4301 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4303 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4304 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4305 be printed without leading spaces.
4307 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4308 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4313 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4314 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4315 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4317 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4319 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4320 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4322 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4323 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4325 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4326 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4328 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4330 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4332 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4334 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4335 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4337 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4339 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4341 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4342 byte offsets are specified.
4345 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4348 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4351 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4352 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4353 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4354 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4355 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4356 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4357 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4358 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4359 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4360 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4361 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4362 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4363 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4364 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4365 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4366 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4367 directory where M has write access.
4368 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4369 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4370 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4373 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4374 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4375 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4376 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4377 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4378 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4379 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4380 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4381 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4382 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4383 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4384 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4385 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4386 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4387 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4388 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4389 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4390 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4391 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4392 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4393 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4394 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4395 appeared one additional time.
4397 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4398 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4399 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4400 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4403 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4404 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4405 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4406 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4407 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4408 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4409 if there were more than 338.
4411 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4412 - false --help now exits nonzero
4415 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4416 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4417 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4418 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4421 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4422 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4423 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4424 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4425 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4428 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4429 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4430 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4431 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4432 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4433 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4434 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4437 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4438 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4439 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4440 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4441 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4442 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4444 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4445 under certain unusual conditions
4446 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4447 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4450 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4451 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4452 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4453 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4454 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4455 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4456 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4457 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4458 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4459 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4460 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4461 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4462 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4463 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4464 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4465 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4468 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4469 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4472 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4473 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4474 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4475 involving hard-linked directories
4476 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4477 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4478 character-special and block files
4481 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4482 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4483 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4484 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4485 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4486 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4487 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4488 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4489 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4491 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4492 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4493 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4494 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4495 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4496 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4497 specified on the command line.
4498 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4499 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4500 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4501 the first file untouched.
4502 * readlink: new program
4503 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4504 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4505 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4506 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4507 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4508 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4511 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4512 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4513 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4514 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4515 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4516 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4517 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4518 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4519 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4520 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4521 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4522 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4524 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4525 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4526 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4528 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4529 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4530 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4531 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4532 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4533 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4534 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4535 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4538 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4539 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4542 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4543 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4544 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4545 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4546 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4547 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4548 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4551 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4552 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4554 ========================================================================
4555 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4556 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4559 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4561 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4562 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4563 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4564 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4565 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4566 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4567 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4568 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4569 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4570 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4571 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4572 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4574 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4575 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4576 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4577 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4579 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4582 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4584 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4585 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4586 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4587 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4588 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4589 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4590 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4593 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4594 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4595 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4596 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4597 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4598 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4599 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4600 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4601 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4602 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4603 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4604 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4605 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4606 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4607 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4608 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4610 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4611 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4613 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4614 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4615 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4616 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4617 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4618 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4620 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4621 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4622 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4623 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4624 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4625 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4626 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4628 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4629 the source files in the following example:
4630 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4631 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4632 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4633 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4634 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4635 links between source files with --preserve=links
4636 * cp accepts new options:
4637 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4638 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4639 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4640 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4641 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4642 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4643 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4644 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4645 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4647 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4648 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4649 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4650 even though it's older than dest.
4651 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4652 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4653 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4654 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4655 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4657 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4658 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4659 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4660 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4661 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4662 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4663 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4665 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4666 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4667 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4669 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4670 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4671 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4672 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4673 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4674 This is the default.
4676 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4677 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4678 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4679 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4680 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4682 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4685 ========================================================================
4686 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4687 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4690 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4691 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4693 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4694 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4695 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4696 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4697 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4699 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4700 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4701 that specifies a non-directory
4704 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4705 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4706 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4707 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4708 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4709 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4710 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4711 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4712 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4713 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4714 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4715 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4716 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4717 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4718 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4719 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4720 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4721 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4722 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4723 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4724 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4725 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4726 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4727 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4729 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4730 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4731 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4733 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4735 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4736 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4738 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4739 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4740 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4741 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4742 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4744 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4745 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4746 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4747 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4748 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4750 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4752 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4753 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4754 * still more portability fixes
4755 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4756 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4758 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4760 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4762 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4764 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4765 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4766 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4767 there is any time remaining
4768 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4770 ========================================================================
4771 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4772 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4774 This package began as the union of the following:
4775 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4777 ========================================================================
4779 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4781 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4782 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4783 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4784 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4785 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4786 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.