1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
8 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
10 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
12 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
13 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
14 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
16 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
17 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
19 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
23 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
24 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
25 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
27 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
28 unique groups with empty lines.
30 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
31 used to identify the split points.
35 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS and UBIFS.
36 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
37 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
38 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
40 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
41 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
42 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
46 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
49 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
53 numfmt: reformat numbers
57 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
58 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
59 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
61 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
62 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
63 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
67 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
70 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
71 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
74 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
75 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
76 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
78 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
79 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
80 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
82 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
83 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
84 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
86 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
87 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
88 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
90 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
93 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
94 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
96 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
97 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
98 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
100 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
101 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
102 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
104 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
105 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
108 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
109 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
110 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
111 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
113 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
114 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
115 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
117 ** Changes in behavior
119 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
120 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
121 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
122 'total' in the target column.
124 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
125 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
126 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
128 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
129 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
133 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
134 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
136 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
137 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
139 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
143 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
144 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
145 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
146 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
147 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
148 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
149 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
150 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
151 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
152 for a patched distribution package.
154 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
155 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
157 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
158 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
159 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
160 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
163 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
167 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
169 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
170 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
171 sha384sum and sha512sum.
175 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
176 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
177 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
178 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
181 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
182 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
184 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
185 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
186 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
187 eventually exits nonzero.
189 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
190 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
191 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
192 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
195 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
196 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
199 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
200 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
203 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
204 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
207 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
208 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
209 Before, this would infloop:
210 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
211 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
213 ** Changes in behavior
215 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
219 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
220 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
221 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
222 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
223 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
226 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
227 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
228 format-changing options.
230 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
231 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
232 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
233 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
234 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
238 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
239 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
240 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
241 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
242 are run without following the instructions in README.
244 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
245 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
246 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
247 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
248 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
249 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
250 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
253 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
257 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
258 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
259 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
260 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
262 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
263 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
264 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
267 sort -u could read freed memory.
268 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
269 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
274 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
275 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
276 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
277 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
280 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
284 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
285 processes will not intersperse their output.
286 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
288 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
289 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
290 date: invalid date '\260'
291 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
293 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
294 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
295 lines output by df, can work reliably.
296 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
298 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
299 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
300 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
302 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
303 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
304 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
305 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
306 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
307 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
309 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
312 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
313 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
315 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
316 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
317 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
319 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
320 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
321 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
325 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
327 ** Changes in behavior
329 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
330 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
331 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
332 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
333 have any reason to include it here.
337 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
338 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
339 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
341 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
342 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
343 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
346 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
350 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
351 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
352 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
353 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
354 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
355 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
357 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
358 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
359 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
360 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
361 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
362 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
363 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
365 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
368 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
369 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
373 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
374 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
376 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
378 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
380 ** Changes in behavior
382 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
383 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
384 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
386 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
387 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
390 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
394 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
395 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
396 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
397 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
398 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
399 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
400 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
401 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
403 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
404 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
405 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
406 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
407 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
409 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
410 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
412 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
413 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
415 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
416 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
418 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
419 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
421 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
422 additional static suffix to output file names.
424 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
425 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
426 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
428 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
429 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
433 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
434 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
437 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
438 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
439 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
440 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
441 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
442 typically still point to one of the hard links.
444 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
445 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
446 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
447 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
448 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
450 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
451 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
452 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
453 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
457 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
458 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
459 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
461 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
462 instead of causing a usage failure.
464 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
467 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
471 realpath: print resolved file names.
475 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
478 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
481 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
482 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
483 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
484 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
485 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
488 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
489 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
490 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
492 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
493 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
496 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
497 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
498 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
499 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
502 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
504 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
507 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
508 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
509 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
511 ** Changes in behavior
513 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
514 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
515 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
516 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
517 usually-short referent instead.
519 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
520 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
521 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
522 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
529 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
530 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
531 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
533 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
536 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
541 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
542 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
544 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
545 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
546 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
547 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
549 ** Changes in behavior
551 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
552 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
553 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
557 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
558 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
559 only .tar.xz files is enough.
562 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
566 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
567 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
568 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
570 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
571 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
573 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
574 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
575 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
576 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
577 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
579 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
580 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
581 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
582 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
583 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
584 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
585 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
586 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
588 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
589 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
591 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
592 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
594 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
597 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
598 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
599 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
601 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
602 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
603 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
606 ** Changes in behavior
608 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
609 when -v or -c specified.
611 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
612 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
616 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
617 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
618 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
619 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
620 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
622 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
623 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
624 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
626 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
627 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
628 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
629 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
630 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
631 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
632 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
634 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
635 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
636 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
640 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
641 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
643 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
646 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
647 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
649 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
650 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
652 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
653 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
655 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
657 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
661 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
662 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
664 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
667 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
671 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
672 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
674 ** Changes in behavior
676 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
677 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
678 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
679 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
680 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
681 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
683 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
684 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
685 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
689 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
692 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
696 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
697 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
700 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
701 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
704 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
705 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
708 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
711 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
714 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
717 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
722 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
723 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
724 processed portion thereof.
726 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
727 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
729 ** Changes in behavior
731 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
732 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
733 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
735 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
736 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
737 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
739 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
740 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
742 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
743 Use --preserve-context instead.
745 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
748 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
752 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
753 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
754 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
755 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
758 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
759 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
761 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
762 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
763 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
765 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
766 reject file names invalid for that file system.
768 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
769 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
773 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
774 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
775 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
776 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
777 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
778 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
779 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
780 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
782 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
783 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
784 the same number of fields are output for each line.
786 ** Changes in behavior
788 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
789 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
790 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
793 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
797 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
798 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
806 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
807 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
809 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
810 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
812 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
813 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
815 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
816 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
817 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
818 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
820 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
821 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
823 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
824 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
825 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
827 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
829 ** Changes in behavior
831 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
832 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
833 to the number of available processors.
837 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
840 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
844 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
845 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
846 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
847 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
849 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
850 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
851 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
853 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
854 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
856 ** Changes in behavior
858 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
859 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
861 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
862 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
863 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
864 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
865 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
866 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
868 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
869 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
870 the same way as the others.
873 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
877 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
878 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
879 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
881 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
882 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
884 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
885 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
886 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
888 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
889 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
891 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
892 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
894 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
895 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
896 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
898 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
899 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
900 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
901 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
905 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
906 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
908 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
911 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
912 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
914 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
916 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
917 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
918 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
920 ** Changes in behavior
922 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
923 rather than its aliased target.
925 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
926 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
927 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
929 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
930 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
931 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
932 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
933 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
934 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
935 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
936 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
938 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
940 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
942 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
943 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
946 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
947 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
948 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
949 control like taskset for example.
951 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
953 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
954 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
955 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
956 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
957 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
958 includes %C when context information is available.
960 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
961 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
962 rather than a file system attribute.
964 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
965 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
966 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
967 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
969 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
970 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
971 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
973 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
974 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
975 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
978 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
982 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
985 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
987 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
988 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
990 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
991 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
992 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
993 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
995 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
996 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
997 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1001 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1002 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1004 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1005 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1006 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1008 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1009 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1010 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1011 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1012 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1013 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1014 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1015 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1016 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1018 ** Changes in behavior
1020 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1021 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1023 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1024 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1027 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1031 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1032 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1033 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1034 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1038 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1039 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1041 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1042 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1043 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1044 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1046 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1047 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1048 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1051 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1055 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1056 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1059 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1060 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1061 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1063 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1066 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1067 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1068 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1071 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1072 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1073 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1075 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1076 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1077 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1078 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1080 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1081 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1084 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1085 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1086 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1089 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1090 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1091 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1093 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1094 processes will not intersperse their output.
1095 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1098 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1102 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1105 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1108 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1109 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1110 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1111 the presence of the empty string argument.
1112 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1114 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1115 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1116 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1117 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1119 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1122 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1123 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1124 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1126 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1127 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1128 and with a malicious user on the same system
1129 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1130 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1133 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1137 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1138 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1141 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1142 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1143 offending directory and all "contents."
1145 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1146 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1147 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1149 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1150 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1151 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1153 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1154 processes will not intersperse their output.
1155 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1156 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1158 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1159 output the name of the file to stdout.
1160 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1162 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1163 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1164 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1166 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1167 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1170 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1171 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1172 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1174 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1175 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1176 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1177 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1178 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1179 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1181 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1182 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1183 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1184 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1186 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1187 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1189 ** Changes in behavior
1191 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1192 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1193 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1194 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1195 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1197 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1198 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1199 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1200 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1202 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1204 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1205 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1206 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1207 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1208 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1212 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1216 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1217 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1219 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1220 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1222 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1223 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1224 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1226 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1227 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1230 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1234 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1235 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1236 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1238 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1239 to accommodate leap seconds.
1240 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1242 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1243 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1246 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1248 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1249 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1250 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1252 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1253 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1254 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1255 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1256 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1260 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1261 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1262 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1263 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1265 ** Changes in behavior
1267 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1268 environment variable is set.
1270 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1271 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1272 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1276 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1277 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1278 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1279 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1281 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1282 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1283 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1284 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1288 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1289 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1290 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1292 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1293 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1294 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1295 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1296 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1297 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1298 another improvement:
1300 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1301 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1304 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1308 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1309 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1310 and libraries tested at configure time.
1311 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1313 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1316 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1319 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1320 printing a summary to stderr.
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1323 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1324 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1325 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1327 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1328 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1330 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1331 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1332 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1333 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1335 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1336 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1337 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1338 which is relatively unusual.
1339 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1341 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1342 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1343 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1344 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1345 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1346 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1351 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1352 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1353 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1354 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1355 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1359 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1360 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1362 ** Changes in behavior
1364 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1365 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1366 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1367 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1368 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1371 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1375 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1376 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1378 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1379 before data copying has started.
1381 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1382 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1384 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1385 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1386 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1387 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1389 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1390 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1391 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1392 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1394 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1399 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1400 for its standard streams.
1402 ** Changes in behavior
1404 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1405 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1406 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1407 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1408 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1409 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1411 ** Deprecated options
1413 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1414 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1418 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1420 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1421 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1422 a btrfs file system.
1424 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1426 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1427 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1429 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1430 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1433 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1437 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1438 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1439 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1440 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1442 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1443 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1444 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1445 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1446 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1451 make check: two tests have been corrected
1455 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1456 inherited from gnulib.
1459 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1463 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1464 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1465 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1466 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1468 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1469 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1471 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1473 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1474 systems without xattr support.
1476 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1477 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1478 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1480 ** Changes in behavior
1482 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1483 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1484 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1485 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1487 ** Improved robustness
1489 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1490 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1491 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1492 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1493 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1494 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1495 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1496 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1497 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1501 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1502 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1504 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1505 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1506 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1507 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1508 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1511 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1515 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1516 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1517 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1521 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1522 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1523 data was read, or on process exit.
1524 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1526 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1527 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1528 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1529 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1531 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1532 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1533 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1534 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1536 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1537 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1539 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1540 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1542 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1543 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1544 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1546 ** Changes in behavior
1548 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1549 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1550 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1552 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1553 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1555 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1556 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1557 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1560 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1564 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1566 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1567 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1568 install: Never copies xattrs
1570 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1571 from overwriting any existing destination file
1573 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1574 mode where this feature is available.
1576 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1577 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1578 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1579 do not modify the destination at all.
1581 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1583 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1587 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1588 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1590 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1592 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1593 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1595 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1596 processing the first file name
1598 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1599 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1600 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1601 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1603 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1604 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1606 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1607 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1610 ** Changes in behavior
1612 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1613 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1615 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1616 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1617 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1619 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1620 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1622 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1624 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1625 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1626 is still marked with a '+'.
1629 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1633 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1634 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1638 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1639 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1640 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1641 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1642 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1643 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1645 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1646 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1648 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1649 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1651 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1653 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1654 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1655 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1657 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1658 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1660 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1661 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1662 used to factor large numbers.
1664 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1667 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1669 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1671 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1672 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1674 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1675 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1676 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1677 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1679 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1680 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1681 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1683 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1684 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1688 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1690 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1691 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1693 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1694 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1696 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1698 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1699 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1703 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1704 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1705 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1707 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1709 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1710 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1711 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1713 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1714 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1715 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1717 ** Changes in behavior
1719 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1720 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1723 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1727 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1728 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1729 'futimens' system calls.
1733 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1735 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1736 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1737 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1739 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1740 with no USERNAME argument.
1742 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1743 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1744 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1746 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1747 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1748 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1749 number of fields for some inputs.
1751 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1752 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1754 ** Changes in behavior
1756 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1757 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1760 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1764 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1766 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1767 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1768 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1769 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1771 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1772 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1774 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1775 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1777 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1778 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1780 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1781 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1782 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1783 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1785 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1786 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1787 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1788 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1789 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1790 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1792 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1793 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1795 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1796 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1797 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1799 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1800 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1802 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1803 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1805 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1806 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1807 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1808 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1810 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1811 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1813 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1814 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1816 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1817 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1818 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1822 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1823 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1825 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1826 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1827 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1828 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1832 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1833 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1835 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1837 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1841 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1842 which have negative errno values.
1846 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1850 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1854 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1855 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1858 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1862 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1863 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1864 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1866 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1867 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1868 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1873 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1874 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1875 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1876 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1879 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1883 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1885 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1886 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1887 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1890 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1894 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1895 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1897 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1899 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1901 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1903 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1907 ** Changes in behavior
1909 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1910 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1912 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1913 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1915 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1916 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1917 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1921 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1922 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1923 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1924 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1925 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1926 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1927 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1928 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1929 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1930 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1931 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1933 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1934 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1935 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1938 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1941 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1942 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1943 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1945 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1946 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1947 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1950 ** New build options
1952 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1953 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1954 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1955 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1957 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1958 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1959 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1960 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1961 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1962 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1963 of "make check" fail.
1965 ** Remove deprecated options
1967 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1968 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1969 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1970 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1971 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1973 ** Improved robustness
1975 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1976 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1977 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1978 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1979 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1980 loss of the contents of a/f.
1982 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1983 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1987 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1988 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1989 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1991 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1992 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1993 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1994 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1996 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1997 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1998 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1999 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2000 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2001 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2002 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2003 destination is a symlink.
2005 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2007 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2008 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2010 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2011 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2013 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2015 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2016 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2018 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2019 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2021 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2024 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2025 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2027 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2028 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2030 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2031 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2032 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2033 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2035 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2036 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2037 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2039 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2040 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2041 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2043 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2044 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2045 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2046 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2048 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2049 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2050 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2052 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2053 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2055 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2056 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2058 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2060 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2061 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2062 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2064 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2065 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2067 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2068 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2070 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2071 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2073 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2074 [present in the original version]
2077 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2081 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2083 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2084 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2085 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2087 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2088 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2090 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2094 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2095 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2097 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2098 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2100 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2101 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2103 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2104 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2105 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2106 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2107 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2108 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2110 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2111 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2114 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2115 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2117 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2120 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2121 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2122 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2124 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2125 directory is unreadable.
2127 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2128 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2129 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2131 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2132 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2133 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2134 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2135 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2138 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2139 Before it would print nothing.
2141 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2143 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2144 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2145 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2146 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2147 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2148 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2149 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2150 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2152 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2156 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2157 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2158 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2160 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2161 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2162 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2163 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2166 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2170 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2171 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2172 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2173 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2174 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2175 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2176 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2178 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2179 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2180 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2181 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2182 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2183 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2184 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2185 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2187 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2188 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2189 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2192 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2196 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2197 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2199 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2200 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2201 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2203 ** Improved robustness
2205 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2206 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2207 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2210 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2214 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2215 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2216 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2217 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2218 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2220 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2224 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2227 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2231 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2232 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2233 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2234 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2236 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2237 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2239 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2240 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2241 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2244 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2246 ** Improved robustness
2248 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2249 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2251 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2252 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2253 or NFS-mounted partition.
2255 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2256 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2260 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2261 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2262 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2263 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2264 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2265 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2267 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2268 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2270 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2271 or neglect to report file removal.
2273 For the "groups" command:
2275 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2276 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2278 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2280 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2282 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2286 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2287 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2290 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2292 ** Changes in behavior
2294 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2295 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2296 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2297 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2299 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2300 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2301 a final './' or '../' component.
2303 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2304 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2305 this only for pipes.
2307 ** Infrastructure changes
2309 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2310 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2311 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2312 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2316 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2317 name is "." or "..".
2319 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2320 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2321 dirent.d_type support.
2323 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2324 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2326 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2327 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2328 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2329 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2332 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2334 ** Changes in behavior
2336 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2340 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2341 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2345 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2346 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2347 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2349 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2350 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2352 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2353 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2355 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2357 ** Improved robustness
2359 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2360 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2361 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2363 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2364 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2367 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2368 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2370 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2371 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2373 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2374 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2376 ** Changes in behavior
2378 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2379 where the two are distinct.
2381 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2382 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2383 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2384 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2385 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2386 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2387 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2388 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2389 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2390 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2391 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2392 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2393 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2394 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2395 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2396 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2397 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2399 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2400 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2401 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2403 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2404 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2405 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2406 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2409 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2410 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2414 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2415 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2416 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2417 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2419 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2420 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2421 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2423 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2424 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2425 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2426 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2427 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2430 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2431 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2433 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2434 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2435 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2436 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2438 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2439 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2440 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2442 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2443 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2444 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2445 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2447 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2448 and sticky) with the -m option.
2450 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2451 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2452 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2453 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2454 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2456 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2457 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2459 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2463 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2464 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2465 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2466 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2468 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2470 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2472 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2473 silently ignoring one of them.
2475 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2476 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2477 containing this change was 5.92.
2479 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2480 automatically newline terminated.
2482 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2483 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2484 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2485 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2488 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2489 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2490 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2493 ** Scheduled for removal
2495 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2496 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2498 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2499 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2500 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2501 command to unlink a directory.
2503 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2504 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2505 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2506 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2510 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2511 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2512 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2513 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2514 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2515 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2519 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2520 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2522 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2524 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2525 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2526 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2528 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2529 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2532 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2533 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2535 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2536 list directories before files.
2538 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2539 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2540 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2541 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2544 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2546 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2548 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2549 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2550 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2552 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2553 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2557 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2558 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2559 usually printing nothing.
2561 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2563 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2564 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2565 them with hard-linked directories.
2567 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2568 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2569 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2571 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2572 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2573 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2575 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2578 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2579 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2581 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2582 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2584 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2585 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2587 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2588 all command-line arguments.
2590 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2592 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2594 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2595 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2597 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2599 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2600 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2601 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2602 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2603 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2605 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2606 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2608 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2609 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2610 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2611 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2613 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2615 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2619 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2620 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2622 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2623 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2625 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2626 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2628 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2629 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2631 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2632 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2634 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2636 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2637 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2638 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2641 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2643 ** Build-related bug fixes
2645 installing .mo files would fail
2648 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2652 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2654 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2657 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2661 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2662 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2666 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2668 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2669 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2671 ** Deprecated options
2673 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2674 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2676 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2680 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2682 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2683 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2684 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2685 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2687 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2690 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2696 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2701 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2703 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2705 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2706 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2707 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2709 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2710 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2711 problematic usages. These include:
2713 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2714 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2715 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2716 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2717 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2718 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2719 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2720 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2721 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2723 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2724 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2726 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2727 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2728 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2729 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2731 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2732 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2733 between binary and text files.
2735 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2739 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2743 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2744 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2746 head tac tail tee tr
2747 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2749 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2750 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2752 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2753 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2754 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2756 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2758 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2760 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2761 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2762 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2766 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2768 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2769 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2771 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2772 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2773 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2777 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2778 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2782 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2783 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2784 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2788 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2789 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2793 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2795 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2797 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2801 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2802 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2803 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2805 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2806 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2807 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2808 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2809 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2811 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2815 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2816 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2817 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2819 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2821 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2822 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2823 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2824 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2826 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2828 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2829 rather than silently wrapping around.
2831 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2832 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2834 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2835 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2837 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2838 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2839 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2840 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2842 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2844 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2846 ** Improved robustness
2848 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2849 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2850 no matter how large the result.
2852 ** Improved portability
2854 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2855 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2857 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2859 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2860 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2861 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2863 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2864 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2868 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2869 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2871 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2873 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2874 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2875 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2876 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2878 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2879 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2881 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2882 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2883 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2885 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2887 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2888 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2890 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2891 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2893 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2895 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2896 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2898 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2899 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2901 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2902 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2903 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2905 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2907 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2909 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2913 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2915 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2916 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2917 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2919 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2920 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2922 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2923 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2924 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2926 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2927 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2929 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2930 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2931 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2932 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2934 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2935 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2937 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2938 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2939 the file system does not support it.
2941 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2943 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2944 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2946 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2948 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2949 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2951 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2952 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2953 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2954 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2956 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2957 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2960 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2961 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2962 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2963 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2965 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2966 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2967 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2968 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2970 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2971 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2973 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2975 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2976 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2977 reporting incorrect results.
2981 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2982 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2984 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2987 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2989 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2990 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2992 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2993 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2995 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2998 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2999 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3000 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3001 the file name does not look like a page range.
3003 printf has several changes:
3005 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3006 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3008 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3009 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3010 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3012 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3013 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3016 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3017 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3019 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3020 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3022 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3024 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3025 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3027 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3029 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3031 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3032 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3033 when first encountering the directory.
3037 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3038 output; POSIX requires this.
3040 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3041 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3043 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3045 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3046 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3048 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3049 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3051 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3052 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3053 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3054 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3055 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3056 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3057 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3059 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3060 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3061 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3063 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3064 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3066 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3068 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3070 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3071 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3072 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3073 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3075 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3079 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3080 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3081 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3082 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3083 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3085 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3086 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3087 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3089 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3090 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3092 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3093 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3095 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3096 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3097 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3098 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3099 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3101 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3102 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3104 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3105 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3107 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3109 nocreat do not create the output file
3110 excl fail if the output file already exists
3111 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3112 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3114 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3116 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3117 direct use direct I/O for data
3118 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3119 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3120 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3121 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3122 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3124 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3126 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3127 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3130 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3131 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3132 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3133 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3134 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3135 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3137 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3138 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3140 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3143 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3145 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3147 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3148 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3150 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3151 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3152 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3154 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3155 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3156 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3158 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3160 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3161 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3163 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3164 for compatibility with bash.
3166 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3168 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3169 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3170 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3171 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3173 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3174 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3176 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3177 ls supports TABSIZE.
3178 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3179 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3180 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3182 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3185 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3187 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3188 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3189 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3190 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3191 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3192 an offset, not as a file name.
3194 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3195 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3197 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3198 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3200 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3201 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3203 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3204 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3205 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3207 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3208 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3210 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3211 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3215 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3217 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3219 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3223 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3224 or more arguments between partitions.
3226 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3227 holes in the destination.
3229 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3230 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3231 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3232 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3233 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3234 terminates immediately.
3236 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3238 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3240 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3241 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3242 not the empty string.
3244 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3245 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3249 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3250 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3251 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3254 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3261 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3265 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3266 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3268 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3269 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3271 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3272 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3273 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3276 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3280 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3281 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3283 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3284 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3286 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3287 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3288 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3290 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3292 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3295 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3297 ** Configuration option
3299 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3300 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3304 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3305 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3309 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3310 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3311 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3314 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3315 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3316 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3317 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3318 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3319 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3320 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3323 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3327 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3328 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3329 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3331 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3332 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3334 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3336 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3337 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3338 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3339 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3341 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3343 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3344 not just the ones that reference directories
3346 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3347 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3349 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3350 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3351 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3353 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3354 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3355 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3356 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3357 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3358 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3360 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3365 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3366 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3368 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3370 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3372 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3374 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3375 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3377 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3378 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3380 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3382 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3386 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3388 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3390 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3391 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3392 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3393 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3394 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3396 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3397 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3399 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3400 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3402 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3403 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3405 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3406 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3407 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3411 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3412 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3413 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3414 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3415 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3416 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3417 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3418 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3419 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3420 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3421 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3422 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3423 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3424 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3426 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3428 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3429 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3431 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3433 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3435 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3436 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3438 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3440 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3441 without a trailing newline.
3443 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3444 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3446 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3449 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3453 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3455 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3457 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3458 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3459 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3460 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3462 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3464 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3465 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3466 be printed without leading spaces.
3468 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3469 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3474 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3475 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3476 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3478 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3480 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3481 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3483 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3484 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3486 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3487 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3489 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3491 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3493 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3495 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3496 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3498 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3500 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3502 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3503 byte offsets are specified.
3506 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3509 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3512 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3513 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3514 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3515 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3516 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3517 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3518 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3519 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3520 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3521 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3522 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3523 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3524 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3525 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3526 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3527 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3528 directory where M has write access.
3529 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3530 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3531 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3534 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3535 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3536 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3537 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3538 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3539 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3540 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3541 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3542 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3543 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3544 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3545 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3546 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3547 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3548 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3549 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3550 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3551 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3552 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3553 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3554 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3555 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3556 appeared one additional time.
3558 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3559 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3560 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3561 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3564 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3565 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3566 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3567 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3568 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3569 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3570 if there were more than 338.
3572 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3573 - false --help now exits nonzero
3576 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3577 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3578 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3579 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3582 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3583 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3584 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3585 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3586 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3589 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3590 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3591 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3592 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3593 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3594 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3595 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3598 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3599 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3600 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3601 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3602 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3603 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3605 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3606 under certain unusual conditions
3607 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3608 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3611 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3612 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3613 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3614 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3615 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3616 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3617 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3618 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3619 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3620 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3621 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3622 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3623 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3624 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3625 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3626 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3629 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3630 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3633 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3634 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3635 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3636 involving hard-linked directories
3637 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3638 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3639 character-special and block files
3642 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3643 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3644 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3645 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3646 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3647 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3648 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3649 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3650 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3652 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3653 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3654 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3655 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3656 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3657 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3658 specified on the command line.
3659 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3660 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3661 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3662 the first file untouched.
3663 * readlink: new program
3664 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3665 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3666 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3667 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3668 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3669 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3672 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3673 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3674 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3675 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3676 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3677 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3678 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3679 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3680 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3681 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3682 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3683 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3685 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3686 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3687 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3689 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3690 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3691 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3692 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3693 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3694 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3695 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3696 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3699 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3700 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3703 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3704 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3705 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3706 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3707 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3708 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3709 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3712 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3713 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3715 ========================================================================
3716 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3717 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3720 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3722 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3723 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3724 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3725 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3726 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3727 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3728 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3729 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3730 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3731 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3732 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3733 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3735 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3736 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3737 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3738 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3740 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3743 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3745 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3746 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3747 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3748 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3749 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3750 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3751 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3754 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3755 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3756 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3757 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3758 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3759 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3760 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3761 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3762 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3763 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3764 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3765 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3766 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3767 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3768 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3769 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3771 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3772 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3774 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3775 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3776 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3777 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3778 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3779 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3781 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3782 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3783 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3784 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3785 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3786 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3787 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3789 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3790 the source files in the following example:
3791 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3792 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3793 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3794 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3795 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3796 links between source files with --preserve=links
3797 * cp accepts new options:
3798 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3799 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3800 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3801 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3802 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3803 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3804 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3805 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3806 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3808 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3809 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3810 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3811 even though it's older than dest.
3812 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3813 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3814 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3815 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3816 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3818 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3819 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3820 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3821 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3822 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3823 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3824 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3826 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3827 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3828 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3830 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3831 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3832 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3833 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3834 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3835 This is the default.
3837 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3838 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3839 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3840 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3841 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3843 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3846 ========================================================================
3847 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3848 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3851 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3852 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3854 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3855 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3856 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3857 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3858 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3860 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3861 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3862 that specifies a non-directory
3865 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3866 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3867 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3868 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3869 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3870 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3871 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3872 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3873 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3874 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3875 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3876 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3877 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3878 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3879 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3880 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3881 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3882 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3883 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3884 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3885 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3886 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3887 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3888 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3890 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3891 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3892 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3894 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3896 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3897 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3899 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3900 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3901 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3902 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3903 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3905 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3906 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3907 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3908 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3909 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3911 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3913 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3914 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3915 * still more portability fixes
3916 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3917 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3919 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3921 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3923 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3925 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3926 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3927 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3928 there is any time remaining
3929 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3931 ========================================================================
3932 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3933 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3935 This package began as the union of the following:
3936 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3938 ========================================================================
3940 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3942 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3943 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3944 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3945 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3946 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3947 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.