1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
8 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
11 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
12 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
15 df non longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
16 specifying -x nfs will no longer hang with problematic nfs mounts.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
19 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
22 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
23 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
26 tail -F 'dir/file' now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
27 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
31 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
32 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
33 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
35 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
36 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
39 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
43 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
44 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
45 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
47 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
48 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
51 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
52 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
53 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
55 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
56 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
59 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
60 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
61 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
63 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
64 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
65 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
66 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
67 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
69 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
70 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
71 depending on the size of the first file processed.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
76 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
77 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
78 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
79 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
81 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
82 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
83 time zone is indeterminate.
85 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
86 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
87 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
88 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
90 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
91 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
92 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
94 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
95 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
97 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
98 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
99 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
103 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
104 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
105 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
108 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
112 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
113 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
116 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
117 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
120 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
121 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
122 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
123 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
124 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
126 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
127 System V style platforms where this information is available only
128 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
130 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
133 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
134 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
137 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
138 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
139 defaults to a different SELinux context.
141 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
144 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
145 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
146 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
148 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
149 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
151 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
152 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
153 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
155 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
157 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
158 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
160 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
161 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
163 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
164 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
166 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
169 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
170 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
171 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
172 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
174 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
175 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
176 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
178 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
179 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
180 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
182 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
183 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
186 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
187 only doing so if --retry is specified.
188 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
190 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
193 ** Changes in behavior
195 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
197 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
198 values for any argument.
200 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
201 they are out of localtime range.
203 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
204 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
205 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
206 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
210 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
211 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
212 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
214 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
215 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
217 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
218 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
220 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
222 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
223 written to a terminal.
225 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
226 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
228 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
229 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
230 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
231 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
232 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
233 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
234 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
235 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
236 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
237 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
238 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
240 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
241 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
245 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
246 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
250 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
252 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
253 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
255 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
258 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
262 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
263 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
264 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
267 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
270 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
271 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
274 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
277 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
278 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
281 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
284 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
285 that specify an offset for the first field.
286 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
288 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
293 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
294 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
298 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
299 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
301 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
302 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
303 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
304 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
305 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
307 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
308 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
309 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
311 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
312 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
313 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
315 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
316 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
318 ** Changes in behavior
320 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
321 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
323 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
324 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
326 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
327 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
329 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
330 when outputting to a terminal.
332 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
336 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
337 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
339 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
340 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
342 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
343 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
344 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
346 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
347 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
349 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
350 upon detection of a directory cycle.
351 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
353 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
355 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
356 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
357 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
359 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
360 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
363 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
367 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
368 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
370 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
373 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
374 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
377 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
378 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
379 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
380 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
382 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
383 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
384 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
385 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
387 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
388 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
390 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
391 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
393 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
394 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
395 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
397 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
398 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
399 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
401 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
402 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
403 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
405 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
406 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
407 character at the 4GiB position.
408 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
410 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
411 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
413 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
414 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
416 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
417 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
420 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
423 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
424 replaced before inotify watches were created.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
427 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
428 [bug introduced in the beginning]
430 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
431 when those files are being created or renamed.
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
436 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
437 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
438 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
439 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
441 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
442 on stderr approximately every second.
444 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
445 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
447 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
448 other than the default newline character.
450 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
451 a useful setting with high latency links.
453 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
454 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
456 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
457 and output errors in general.
459 ** Changes in behavior
461 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
462 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
463 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
464 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
466 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
467 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
468 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
469 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
470 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
472 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
473 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
475 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
477 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
478 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
480 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
481 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
485 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
486 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
488 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
489 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
491 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
492 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
494 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
495 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
497 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
499 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
500 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
501 documentation are provided.
504 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
508 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
511 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
512 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
513 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
516 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
517 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
518 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
521 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
522 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
524 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
525 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
527 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
528 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
529 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
530 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
531 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
532 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
546 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
548 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
549 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
550 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
551 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
552 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
553 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
555 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
556 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
557 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
560 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
561 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
564 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
565 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
566 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
569 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
570 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
571 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
573 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
574 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
575 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
577 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
578 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
579 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
580 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
583 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
584 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
585 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
587 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
588 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
590 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
591 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
592 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
594 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
595 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
597 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
598 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
600 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
603 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
604 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
606 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
607 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
608 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
610 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
611 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
615 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
616 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
618 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
619 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
620 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
621 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
622 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
623 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
624 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
625 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
626 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
627 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
628 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
629 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
630 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
631 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
632 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
633 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
634 it suitable for embedded system.
636 ** Changes in behavior
638 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
639 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
641 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
642 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
644 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
645 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
646 will result in the delayed output of lines.
648 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
649 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
650 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
654 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
655 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
656 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
658 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
660 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
661 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
662 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
664 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
665 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
666 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
667 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
669 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
670 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
672 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
673 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
674 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
677 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
681 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
682 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
683 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
685 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
686 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
687 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
688 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
690 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
691 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
692 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
694 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
695 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
697 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
699 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
700 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
701 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
703 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
704 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
705 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
707 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
708 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
709 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
712 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
713 from the source, when copying across file systems.
714 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
716 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
717 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
718 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
720 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
721 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
723 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
724 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
725 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
726 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
728 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
729 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
730 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
732 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
733 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
734 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
738 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
739 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
740 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
742 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
743 used to identify the split points.
745 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
746 command line argument through to the output.
748 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
751 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
752 a NUL instead of a white space character.
754 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
755 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
757 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
759 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
760 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
761 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
763 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
764 unique groups with empty lines.
766 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
767 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
769 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
772 ** Changes in behavior
774 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
775 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
776 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
777 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
779 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
780 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
782 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
783 not just the transfer counts.
785 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
787 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
788 as per the documented interface.
792 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
794 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
795 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
796 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
797 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
799 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
800 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
801 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
802 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
804 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
805 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
806 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
808 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
809 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
811 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
812 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
814 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
818 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
821 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
825 numfmt: reformat numbers
829 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
830 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
831 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
833 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
834 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
835 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
837 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
838 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
842 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
845 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
846 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
849 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
850 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
851 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
853 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
854 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
855 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
857 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
858 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
859 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
861 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
862 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
863 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
865 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
868 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
869 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
871 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
872 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
873 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
875 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
876 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
877 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
879 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
880 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
881 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
883 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
884 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
885 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
886 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
888 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
889 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
890 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
892 ** Changes in behavior
894 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
895 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
896 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
897 'total' in the target column.
899 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
900 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
901 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
903 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
904 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
906 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
907 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
911 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
912 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
914 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
915 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
917 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
921 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
922 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
923 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
924 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
925 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
926 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
927 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
928 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
929 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
930 for a patched distribution package.
932 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
933 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
935 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
936 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
937 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
938 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
941 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
945 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
947 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
948 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
949 sha384sum and sha512sum.
953 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
954 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
955 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
956 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
957 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
959 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
960 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
962 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
963 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
964 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
965 eventually exits nonzero.
967 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
968 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
969 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
970 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
973 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
974 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
977 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
978 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
979 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
981 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
982 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
985 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
986 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
987 Before, this would infloop:
988 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
989 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
991 ** Changes in behavior
993 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
997 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
998 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
999 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1000 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1001 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1004 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1005 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1006 format-changing options.
1008 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1009 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1010 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1011 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1012 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1016 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1017 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1018 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1019 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1020 are run without following the instructions in README.
1022 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1023 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1024 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1025 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1026 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1027 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1028 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1031 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1035 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1036 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1037 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1038 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1040 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1041 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1042 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1045 sort -u could read freed memory.
1046 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1047 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1052 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1053 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1054 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1055 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1058 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1062 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1063 processes will not intersperse their output.
1064 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1066 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1067 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1068 date: invalid date '\260'
1069 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1071 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1072 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1073 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1074 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1076 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1077 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1078 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1080 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1081 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1082 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1083 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1084 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1085 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1087 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1088 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1090 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1091 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1093 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1094 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1095 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1097 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1098 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1099 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1103 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1105 ** Changes in behavior
1107 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1108 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1109 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1110 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1111 have any reason to include it here.
1115 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1116 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1117 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1119 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1120 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1121 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1124 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1128 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1129 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1130 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1131 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1132 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1133 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1135 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1136 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1137 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1138 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1139 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1140 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1141 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1143 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1144 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1146 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1147 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1151 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1152 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1154 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1156 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1158 ** Changes in behavior
1160 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1161 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1162 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1164 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1165 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1168 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1172 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1173 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1174 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1175 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1176 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1177 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1178 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1179 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1181 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1182 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1183 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1184 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1185 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1187 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1188 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1190 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1191 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1193 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1194 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1196 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1197 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1199 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1200 additional static suffix to output file names.
1202 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1203 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1204 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1206 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1207 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1211 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1212 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1215 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1216 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1217 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1218 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1219 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1220 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1222 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1223 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1224 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1225 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1226 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1228 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1229 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1230 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1231 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1235 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1236 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1237 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1239 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1240 instead of causing a usage failure.
1242 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1249 realpath: print resolved file names.
1253 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1254 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1256 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1259 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1260 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1261 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1262 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1263 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1264 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1266 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1267 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1268 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1270 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1271 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1272 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1274 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1275 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1276 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1277 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1280 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1282 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1283 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1285 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1286 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1287 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1289 ** Changes in behavior
1291 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1292 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1293 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1294 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1295 usually-short referent instead.
1297 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1298 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1299 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1300 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1303 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1307 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1308 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1309 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1311 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1312 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1314 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1319 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1320 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1322 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1323 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1324 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1325 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1327 ** Changes in behavior
1329 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1330 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1331 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1335 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1336 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1337 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1340 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1344 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1345 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1346 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1348 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1349 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1351 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1352 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1353 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1354 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1355 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1357 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1358 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1359 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1360 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1361 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1362 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1363 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1364 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1366 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1367 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1369 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1370 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1372 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1375 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1376 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1377 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1379 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1380 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1381 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1382 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1384 ** Changes in behavior
1386 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1387 when -v or -c specified.
1389 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1390 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1394 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1395 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1396 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1397 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1398 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1400 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1401 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1402 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1404 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1405 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1406 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1407 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1408 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1409 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1410 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1412 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1413 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1414 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1418 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1419 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1421 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1424 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1425 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1427 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1428 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1430 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1431 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1433 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1435 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1439 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1440 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1442 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1445 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1449 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1450 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1452 ** Changes in behavior
1454 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1455 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1456 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1457 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1458 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1459 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1460 resolved for 2.6.39.
1461 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1462 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1463 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1467 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1470 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1474 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1475 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1476 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1478 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1479 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1482 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1483 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1484 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1486 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1489 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1490 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1492 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1493 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1495 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1500 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1501 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1502 processed portion thereof.
1504 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1505 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1507 ** Changes in behavior
1509 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1510 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1511 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1513 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1514 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1515 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1517 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1518 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1520 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1521 Use --preserve-context instead.
1523 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1526 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1530 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1531 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1532 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1533 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1534 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1536 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1537 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1539 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1540 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1541 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1543 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1544 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1546 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1547 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1551 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1552 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1553 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1554 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1555 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1556 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1557 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1558 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1560 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1561 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1562 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1564 ** Changes in behavior
1566 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1567 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1568 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1571 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1575 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1576 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1580 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1584 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1585 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1587 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1588 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1590 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1591 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1593 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1594 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1595 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1598 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1599 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1601 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1602 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1603 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1605 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1607 ** Changes in behavior
1609 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1610 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1611 to the number of available processors.
1615 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1618 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1622 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1623 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1624 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1625 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1627 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1628 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1629 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1631 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1632 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1634 ** Changes in behavior
1636 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1637 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1639 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1640 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1641 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1642 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1643 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1644 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1646 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1647 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1648 the same way as the others.
1650 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1651 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1654 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1658 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1659 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1660 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1662 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1663 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1665 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1666 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1667 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1669 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1670 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1672 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1675 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1676 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1677 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1679 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1680 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1681 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1682 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1686 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1687 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1689 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1692 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1693 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1695 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1697 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1698 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1699 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1701 ** Changes in behavior
1703 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1704 rather than its aliased target.
1706 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1707 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1708 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1710 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1711 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1712 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1713 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1714 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1715 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1716 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1717 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1719 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1721 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1723 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1724 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1727 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1728 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1729 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1730 control like taskset for example.
1732 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1734 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1735 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1736 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1737 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1738 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1739 includes %C when context information is available.
1741 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1742 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1743 rather than a file system attribute.
1745 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1746 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1747 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1748 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1750 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1751 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1752 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1754 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1755 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1756 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1763 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1764 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1766 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1768 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1769 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1771 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1772 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1773 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1774 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1776 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1777 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1782 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1783 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1785 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1786 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1787 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1789 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1790 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1791 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1792 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1793 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1794 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1795 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1796 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1797 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1799 ** Changes in behavior
1801 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1802 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1804 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1805 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1808 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1812 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1813 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1814 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1815 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1819 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1820 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1822 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1823 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1824 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1825 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1827 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1828 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1829 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1832 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1836 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1837 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1838 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1840 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1841 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1842 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1844 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1845 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1847 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1848 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1849 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1850 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1852 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1853 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1854 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1856 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1857 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1858 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1859 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1861 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1862 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1863 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1865 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1866 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1867 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1868 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1870 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1871 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1874 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1875 processes will not intersperse their output.
1876 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1879 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1883 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1886 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1889 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1890 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1891 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1892 the presence of the empty string argument.
1893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1895 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1896 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1897 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1898 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1900 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1901 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1903 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1904 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1905 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1907 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1908 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1909 and with a malicious user on the same system
1910 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1911 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1914 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1918 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1919 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1920 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1922 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1923 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1924 offending directory and all "contents."
1926 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1927 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1928 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1930 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1931 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1932 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1934 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1935 processes will not intersperse their output.
1936 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1937 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1939 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1940 output the name of the file to stdout.
1941 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1943 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1944 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1945 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1947 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1948 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1951 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1952 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1953 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1955 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1956 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1957 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1958 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1959 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1960 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1962 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1963 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1964 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1965 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1967 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1968 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1970 ** Changes in behavior
1972 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1973 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1974 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1975 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1976 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1978 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1979 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1980 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1981 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1983 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1985 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1986 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1987 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1988 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1989 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1993 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1997 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1998 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2000 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2001 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2003 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2004 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2005 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2007 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2008 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2011 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2015 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2016 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2017 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2019 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2020 to accommodate leap seconds.
2021 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2023 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2024 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2025 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2027 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2029 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2030 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2031 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2033 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2034 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2035 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2036 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2037 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2041 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2042 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2043 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2044 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2046 ** Changes in behavior
2048 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2049 environment variable is set.
2051 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2052 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2053 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2057 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2058 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2059 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2060 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2062 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2063 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2064 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2065 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2069 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2070 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2071 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2073 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2074 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2075 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2076 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2077 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2078 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2079 another improvement:
2081 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2082 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2089 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2090 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2091 and libraries tested at configure time.
2092 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2094 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2095 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2097 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2098 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2100 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2101 printing a summary to stderr.
2102 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2104 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2105 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2106 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2108 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2109 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2111 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2112 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2113 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2114 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2116 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2117 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2118 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2119 which is relatively unusual.
2120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2122 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2123 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2124 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2125 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2126 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2127 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2132 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2133 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2134 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2135 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2136 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2140 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2141 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2143 ** Changes in behavior
2145 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2146 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2147 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2148 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2149 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2152 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2156 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2157 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2159 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2160 before data copying has started.
2162 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2163 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2165 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2166 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2167 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2168 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2170 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2171 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2172 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2173 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2175 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2180 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2181 for its standard streams.
2183 ** Changes in behavior
2185 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2186 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2187 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2188 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2189 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2190 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2192 ** Deprecated options
2194 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2195 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2199 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2201 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2202 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2203 a btrfs file system.
2205 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2207 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2208 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2210 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2211 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2214 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2218 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2219 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2220 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2221 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2223 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2224 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2225 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2226 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2227 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2232 make check: two tests have been corrected
2236 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2237 inherited from gnulib.
2240 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2244 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2245 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2246 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2247 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2249 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2250 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2252 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2254 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2255 systems without xattr support.
2257 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2258 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2259 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2261 ** Changes in behavior
2263 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2264 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2265 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2266 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2268 ** Improved robustness
2270 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2271 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2272 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2273 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2274 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2275 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2276 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2277 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2278 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2282 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2283 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2285 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2286 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2287 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2288 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2289 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2292 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2296 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2297 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2298 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2302 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2303 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2304 data was read, or on process exit.
2305 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2307 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2308 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2309 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2310 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2312 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2313 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2314 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2315 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2317 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2318 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2320 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2321 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2323 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2324 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2325 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2327 ** Changes in behavior
2329 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2330 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2331 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2333 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2334 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2336 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2337 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2338 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2341 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2345 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2347 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2348 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2349 install: Never copies xattrs
2351 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2352 from overwriting any existing destination file
2354 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2355 mode where this feature is available.
2357 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2358 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2359 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2360 do not modify the destination at all.
2362 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2364 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2368 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2369 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2371 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2373 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2374 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2376 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2377 processing the first file name
2379 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2380 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2381 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2382 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2384 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2385 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2387 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2388 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2391 ** Changes in behavior
2393 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2394 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2396 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2397 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2398 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2400 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2401 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2403 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2405 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2406 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2407 is still marked with a '+'.
2410 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2414 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2415 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2419 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2420 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2421 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2422 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2423 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2424 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2426 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2427 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2429 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2430 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2432 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2434 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2435 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2436 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2438 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2439 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2441 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2442 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2443 used to factor large numbers.
2445 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2448 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2450 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2452 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2453 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2455 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2456 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2457 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2458 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2460 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2461 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2462 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2464 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2465 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2469 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2471 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2472 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2474 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2475 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2477 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2479 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2480 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2484 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2485 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2486 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2488 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2490 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2491 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2492 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2494 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2495 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2496 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2498 ** Changes in behavior
2500 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2501 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2504 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2508 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2509 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2510 'futimens' system calls.
2514 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2516 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2517 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2518 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2520 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2521 with no USERNAME argument.
2523 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2524 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2525 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2527 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2528 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2529 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2530 number of fields for some inputs.
2532 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2533 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2535 ** Changes in behavior
2537 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2538 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2541 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2545 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2547 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2548 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2549 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2550 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2552 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2553 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2555 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2556 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2558 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2559 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2561 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2562 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2563 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2564 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2566 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2567 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2568 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2569 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2570 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2571 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2573 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2574 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2576 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2577 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2578 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2580 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2581 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2583 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2584 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2586 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2587 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2588 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2589 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2591 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2592 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2594 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2595 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2597 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2598 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2599 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2603 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2604 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2606 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2607 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2608 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2609 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2613 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2614 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2616 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2618 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2622 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2623 which have negative errno values.
2627 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2631 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2635 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2636 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2639 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2643 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2644 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2645 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2647 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2648 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2649 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2650 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2654 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2655 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2656 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2657 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2660 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2664 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2666 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2667 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2671 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2675 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2676 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2678 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2680 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2682 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2684 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2688 ** Changes in behavior
2690 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2691 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2693 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2694 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2696 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2697 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2698 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2702 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2703 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2704 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2705 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2706 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2707 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2708 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2709 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2710 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2711 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2712 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2714 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2715 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2716 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2719 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2722 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2723 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2724 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2726 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2727 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2728 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2731 ** New build options
2733 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2734 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2735 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2736 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2738 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2739 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2740 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2741 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2742 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2743 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2744 of "make check" fail.
2746 ** Remove deprecated options
2748 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2749 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2750 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2751 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2752 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2754 ** Improved robustness
2756 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2757 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2758 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2759 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2760 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2761 loss of the contents of a/f.
2763 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2764 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2768 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2769 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2770 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2772 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2773 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2774 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2775 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2777 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2778 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2779 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2780 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2781 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2782 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2783 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2784 destination is a symlink.
2786 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2788 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2789 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2791 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2792 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2794 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2796 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2797 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2799 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2800 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2802 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2805 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2806 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2808 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2809 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2811 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2812 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2813 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2814 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2816 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2817 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2818 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2820 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2821 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2822 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2824 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2825 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2826 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2827 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2829 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2830 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2831 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2833 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2834 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2836 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2837 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2839 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2841 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2842 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2843 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2845 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2846 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2848 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2849 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2851 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2852 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2854 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2855 [present in the original version]
2858 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2862 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2864 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2865 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2866 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2868 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2869 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2871 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2875 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2876 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2878 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2879 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2881 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2882 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2884 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2885 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2886 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2887 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2888 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2889 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2891 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2892 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2895 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2896 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2898 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2901 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2902 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2903 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2905 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2906 directory is unreadable.
2908 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2909 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2910 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2912 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2913 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2914 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2915 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2916 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2919 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2920 Before it would print nothing.
2922 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2924 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2925 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2926 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2927 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2928 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2929 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2930 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2931 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2933 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2937 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2938 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2939 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2941 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2942 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2943 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2944 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2951 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2952 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2953 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2954 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2955 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2956 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2957 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2959 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2960 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2961 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2962 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2963 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2964 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2965 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2966 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2968 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2969 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2970 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2973 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2977 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2978 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2980 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2981 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2982 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2984 ** Improved robustness
2986 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2987 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2988 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2991 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2995 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2996 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2997 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2998 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2999 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3001 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3005 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3008 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3012 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3013 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3014 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3015 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3017 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3018 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3020 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3021 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3022 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3025 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3027 ** Improved robustness
3029 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3030 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3032 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3033 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3034 or NFS-mounted partition.
3036 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3037 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3041 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3042 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3043 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3044 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3045 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3046 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3048 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3049 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3051 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3052 or neglect to report file removal.
3054 For the "groups" command:
3056 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3057 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3059 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3061 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3063 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3067 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3068 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3071 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3073 ** Changes in behavior
3075 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3076 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3077 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3078 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3080 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3081 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3082 a final './' or '../' component.
3084 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3085 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3086 this only for pipes.
3088 ** Infrastructure changes
3090 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3091 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3092 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3093 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3097 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3098 name is "." or "..".
3100 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3101 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3102 dirent.d_type support.
3104 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3105 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3107 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3108 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3109 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3110 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3113 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3115 ** Changes in behavior
3117 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3121 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3122 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3126 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3127 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3128 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3130 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3131 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3133 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3134 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3136 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3138 ** Improved robustness
3140 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3141 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3142 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3144 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3145 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3148 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3149 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3151 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3152 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3154 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3155 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3157 ** Changes in behavior
3159 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3160 where the two are distinct.
3162 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3163 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3164 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3165 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3166 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3167 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3168 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3169 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3170 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3171 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3172 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3173 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3174 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3175 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3176 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3177 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3178 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3180 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3181 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3182 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3184 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3185 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3186 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3187 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3190 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3191 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3195 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3196 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3197 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3198 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3200 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3201 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3202 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3204 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3205 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3206 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3207 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3208 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3211 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3212 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3214 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3215 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3216 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3217 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3219 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3220 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3221 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3223 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3224 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3225 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3226 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3228 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3229 and sticky) with the -m option.
3231 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3232 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3233 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3234 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3235 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3237 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3238 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3240 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3244 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3245 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3246 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3247 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3249 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3251 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3253 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3254 silently ignoring one of them.
3256 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3257 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3258 containing this change was 5.92.
3260 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3261 automatically newline terminated.
3263 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3264 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3265 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3266 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3269 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3270 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3271 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3274 ** Scheduled for removal
3276 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3277 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3279 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3280 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3281 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3282 command to unlink a directory.
3284 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3285 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3286 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3287 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3291 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3292 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3293 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3294 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3295 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3296 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3300 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3301 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3303 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3305 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3306 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3307 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3309 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3310 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3313 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3314 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3316 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3317 list directories before files.
3319 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3320 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3321 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3322 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3325 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3327 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3329 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3330 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3331 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3333 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3334 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3338 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3339 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3340 usually printing nothing.
3342 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3344 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3345 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3346 them with hard-linked directories.
3348 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3349 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3350 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3352 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3353 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3354 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3356 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3359 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3360 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3362 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3363 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3365 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3366 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3368 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3369 all command-line arguments.
3371 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3373 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3375 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3376 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3378 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3380 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3381 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3382 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3383 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3384 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3386 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3387 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3389 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3390 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3391 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3392 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3394 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3396 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3400 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3401 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3403 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3404 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3406 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3407 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3409 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3410 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3412 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3413 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3415 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3417 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3418 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3419 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3422 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3424 ** Build-related bug fixes
3426 installing .mo files would fail
3429 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3433 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3435 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3438 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3442 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3443 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3447 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3449 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3450 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3452 ** Deprecated options
3454 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3455 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3457 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3461 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3463 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3464 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3465 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3466 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3468 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3471 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3477 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3482 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3484 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3486 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3487 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3488 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3490 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3491 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3492 problematic usages. These include:
3494 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3495 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3496 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3497 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3498 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3499 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3500 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3501 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3502 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3504 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3505 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3507 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3508 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3509 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3510 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3512 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3513 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3514 between binary and text files.
3516 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3520 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3524 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3525 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3527 head tac tail tee tr
3528 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3530 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3531 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3533 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3534 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3535 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3537 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3539 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3541 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3542 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3543 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3547 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3549 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3550 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3552 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3553 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3554 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3558 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3559 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3563 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3564 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3565 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3569 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3570 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3574 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3576 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3578 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3582 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3583 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3584 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3586 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3587 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3588 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3589 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3590 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3592 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3596 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3597 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3598 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3600 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3602 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3603 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3604 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3605 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3607 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3609 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3610 rather than silently wrapping around.
3612 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3613 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3615 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3616 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3618 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3619 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3620 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3621 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3623 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3625 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3627 ** Improved robustness
3629 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3630 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3631 no matter how large the result.
3633 ** Improved portability
3635 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3636 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3638 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3640 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3641 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3642 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3644 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3645 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3649 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3650 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3652 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3654 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3655 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3656 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3657 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3659 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3660 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3662 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3663 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3664 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3666 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3668 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3669 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3671 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3672 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3674 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3676 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3677 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3679 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3680 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3682 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3683 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3684 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3686 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3688 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3690 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3694 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3696 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3697 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3698 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3700 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3701 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3703 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3704 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3705 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3707 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3708 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3710 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3711 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3712 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3713 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3715 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3716 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3718 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3719 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3720 the file system does not support it.
3722 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3724 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3725 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3727 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3729 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3730 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3732 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3733 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3734 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3735 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3737 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3738 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3741 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3742 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3743 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3744 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3746 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3747 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3748 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3749 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3751 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3752 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3754 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3756 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3757 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3758 reporting incorrect results.
3762 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3763 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3765 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3768 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3770 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3771 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3773 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3774 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3776 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3779 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3780 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3781 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3782 the file name does not look like a page range.
3784 printf has several changes:
3786 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3787 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3789 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3790 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3791 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3793 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3794 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3797 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3798 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3800 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3801 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3803 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3805 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3806 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3808 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3810 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3812 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3813 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3814 when first encountering the directory.
3818 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3819 output; POSIX requires this.
3821 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3822 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3824 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3826 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3827 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3829 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3830 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3832 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3833 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3834 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3835 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3836 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3837 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3838 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3840 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3841 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3842 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3844 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3845 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3847 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3849 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3851 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3852 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3853 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3854 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3856 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3860 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3861 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3862 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3863 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3864 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3866 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3867 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3868 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3870 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3871 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3873 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3874 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3876 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3877 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3878 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3879 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3880 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3882 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3883 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3885 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3886 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3888 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3890 nocreat do not create the output file
3891 excl fail if the output file already exists
3892 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3893 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3895 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3897 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3898 direct use direct I/O for data
3899 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3900 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3901 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3902 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3903 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3905 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3907 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3908 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3911 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3912 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3913 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3914 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3915 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3916 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3918 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3919 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3921 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3924 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3926 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3928 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3929 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3931 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3932 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3933 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3935 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3936 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3937 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3939 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3941 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3942 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
3944 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3945 for compatibility with bash.
3947 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3949 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3950 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3951 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3952 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3954 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3955 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3957 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3958 ls supports TABSIZE.
3959 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3960 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3961 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3963 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3966 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3968 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3969 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3970 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3971 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3972 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3973 an offset, not as a file name.
3975 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3976 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3978 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3979 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3981 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3982 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3984 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3985 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3986 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3988 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3989 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3991 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3992 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3996 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3998 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4000 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4004 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4005 or more arguments between partitions.
4007 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4008 holes in the destination.
4010 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4011 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4012 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4013 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4014 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4015 terminates immediately.
4017 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4019 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4021 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4022 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4023 not the empty string.
4025 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4026 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4030 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4031 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4032 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4035 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4042 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4046 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4047 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4049 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4050 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4052 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4053 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4054 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4057 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4061 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4062 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4064 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4065 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4067 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4068 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4069 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4071 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4073 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4076 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4078 ** Configuration option
4080 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4081 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4085 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4086 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4090 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4091 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4092 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4095 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4096 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4097 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4098 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4099 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4100 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4101 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4104 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4108 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4109 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4110 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4112 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4113 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4115 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4117 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4118 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4119 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4120 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4122 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4124 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4125 not just the ones that reference directories
4127 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4128 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4130 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4131 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4132 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4134 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4135 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4136 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4137 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4138 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4139 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4141 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4146 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4147 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4149 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4151 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4153 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4155 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4156 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4158 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4159 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4161 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4163 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4167 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4169 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4171 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4172 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4173 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4174 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4175 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4177 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4178 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4180 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4181 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4183 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4184 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4186 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4187 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4188 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4192 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4193 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4194 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4195 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4196 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4197 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4198 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4199 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4200 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4201 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4202 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4203 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4204 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4205 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4207 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4209 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4210 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4212 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4214 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4216 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4217 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4219 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4221 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4222 without a trailing newline.
4224 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4225 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4227 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4230 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4234 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4236 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4238 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4239 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4240 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4241 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4243 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4245 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4246 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4247 be printed without leading spaces.
4249 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4250 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4255 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4256 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4257 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4259 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4261 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4262 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4264 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4265 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4267 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4268 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4270 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4272 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4274 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4276 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4277 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4279 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4281 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4283 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4284 byte offsets are specified.
4287 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4290 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4293 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4294 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4295 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4296 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4297 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4298 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4299 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4300 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4301 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4302 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4303 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4304 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4305 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4306 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4307 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4308 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4309 directory where M has write access.
4310 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4311 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4312 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4315 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4316 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4317 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4318 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4319 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4320 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4321 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4322 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4323 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4324 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4325 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4326 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4327 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4328 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4329 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4330 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4331 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4332 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4333 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4334 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4335 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4336 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4337 appeared one additional time.
4339 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4340 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4341 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4342 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4345 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4346 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4347 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4348 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4349 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4350 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4351 if there were more than 338.
4353 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4354 - false --help now exits nonzero
4357 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4358 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4359 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4360 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4363 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4364 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4365 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4366 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4367 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4370 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4371 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4372 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4373 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4374 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4375 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4376 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4379 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4380 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4381 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4382 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4383 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4384 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4386 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4387 under certain unusual conditions
4388 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4389 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4392 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4393 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4394 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4395 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4396 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4397 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4398 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4399 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4400 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4401 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4402 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4403 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4404 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4405 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4406 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4407 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4410 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4411 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4414 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4415 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4416 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4417 involving hard-linked directories
4418 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4419 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4420 character-special and block files
4423 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4424 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4425 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4426 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4427 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4428 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4429 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4430 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4431 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4433 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4434 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4435 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4436 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4437 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4438 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4439 specified on the command line.
4440 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4441 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4442 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4443 the first file untouched.
4444 * readlink: new program
4445 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4446 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4447 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4448 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4449 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4450 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4453 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4454 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4455 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4456 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4457 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4458 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4459 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4460 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4461 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4462 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4463 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4464 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4466 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4467 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4468 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4470 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4471 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4472 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4473 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4474 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4475 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4476 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4477 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4480 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4481 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4484 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4485 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4486 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4487 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4488 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4489 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4490 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4493 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4494 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4496 ========================================================================
4497 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4498 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4501 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4503 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4504 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4505 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4506 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4507 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4508 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4509 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4510 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4511 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4512 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4513 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4514 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4516 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4517 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4518 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4519 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4521 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4524 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4526 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4527 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4528 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4529 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4530 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4531 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4532 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4535 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4536 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4537 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4538 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4539 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4540 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4541 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4542 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4543 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4544 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4545 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4546 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4547 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4548 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4549 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4550 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4552 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4553 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4555 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4556 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4557 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4558 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4559 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4560 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4562 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4563 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4564 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4565 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4566 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4567 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4568 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4570 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4571 the source files in the following example:
4572 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4573 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4574 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4575 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4576 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4577 links between source files with --preserve=links
4578 * cp accepts new options:
4579 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4580 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4581 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4582 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4583 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4584 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4585 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4586 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4587 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4589 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4590 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4591 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4592 even though it's older than dest.
4593 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4594 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4595 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4596 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4597 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4599 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4600 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4601 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4602 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4603 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4604 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4605 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4607 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4608 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4609 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4611 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4612 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4613 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4614 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4615 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4616 This is the default.
4618 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4619 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4620 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4621 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4622 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4624 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4627 ========================================================================
4628 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4629 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4632 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4633 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4635 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4636 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4637 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4638 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4639 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4641 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4642 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4643 that specifies a non-directory
4646 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4647 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4648 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4649 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4650 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4651 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4652 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4653 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4654 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4655 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4656 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4657 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4658 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4659 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4660 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4661 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4662 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4663 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4664 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4665 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4666 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4667 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4668 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4669 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4671 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4672 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4673 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4675 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4677 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4678 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4680 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4681 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4682 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4683 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4684 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4686 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4687 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4688 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4689 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4690 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4692 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4694 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4695 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4696 * still more portability fixes
4697 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4698 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4700 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4702 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4704 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4706 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4707 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4708 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4709 there is any time remaining
4710 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4712 ========================================================================
4713 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4714 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4716 This package began as the union of the following:
4717 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4719 ========================================================================
4721 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4723 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4724 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4725 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4726 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4727 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4728 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.