1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
10 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
11 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
12 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
13 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
14 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
17 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
18 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
19 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
21 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
22 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
25 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
28 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS file systems
29 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
30 support, but the GPFS magic number wasn't in the usual places then.]
33 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
37 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
38 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
39 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
41 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
44 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
49 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
50 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
52 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
53 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
54 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
55 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
57 ** Changes in behavior
59 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
60 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
61 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
65 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
66 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
67 only .tar.xz files is enough.
70 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
74 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
75 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
76 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
78 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
79 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
81 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
82 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
83 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
84 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
85 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
87 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
88 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
89 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
90 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
91 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
92 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
93 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
94 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
96 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
97 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
99 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
100 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
102 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
105 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
106 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
107 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
109 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
110 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
111 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
112 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
114 ** Changes in behavior
116 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
117 when -v or -c specified.
119 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
120 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
124 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
125 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
126 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
127 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
128 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
130 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
131 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
132 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
134 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
135 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
136 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
137 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
138 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
139 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
140 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
142 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
143 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
144 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
148 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
149 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
151 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
154 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
155 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
157 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
158 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
160 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
161 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
163 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
165 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
169 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
170 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
172 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
175 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
179 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
180 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
182 ** Changes in behavior
184 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
185 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
186 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
187 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
188 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
189 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
191 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
192 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
193 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
197 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
200 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
204 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
205 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
208 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
209 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
212 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
213 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
216 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
219 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
222 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
225 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
230 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
231 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
232 processed portion thereof.
234 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
235 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
240 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
241 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
243 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
244 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
245 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
247 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
248 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
250 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
251 Use --preserve-context instead.
253 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
256 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
260 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
261 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
262 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
263 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
266 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
267 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
269 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
270 reject file names invalid for that file system.
272 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
277 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
278 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
279 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
280 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
281 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
282 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
283 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
284 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
286 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
287 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
288 the same number of fields are output for each line.
290 ** Changes in behavior
292 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
293 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
294 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
297 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
301 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
302 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
306 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
310 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
311 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
313 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
314 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
316 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
317 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
319 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
320 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
321 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
322 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
324 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
325 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
327 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
328 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
329 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
331 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
333 ** Changes in behavior
335 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
336 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
337 to the number of available processors.
341 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
344 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
348 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
349 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
350 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
351 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
353 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
354 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
355 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
357 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
358 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
360 ** Changes in behavior
362 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
363 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
365 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
366 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
367 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
368 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
369 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
370 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
372 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
373 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
374 the same way as the others.
377 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
381 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
382 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
383 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
385 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
386 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
388 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
389 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
390 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
392 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
395 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
398 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
399 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
400 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
402 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
403 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
404 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
405 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
409 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
410 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
412 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
415 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
416 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
418 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
420 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
421 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
422 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
424 ** Changes in behavior
426 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
427 rather than its aliased target.
429 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
430 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
431 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
433 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
434 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
435 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
436 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
437 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
438 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
439 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
440 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
442 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
444 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
446 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
447 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
450 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
451 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
452 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
453 control like taskset for example.
455 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
457 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
458 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
459 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
460 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
461 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
462 includes %C when context information is available.
464 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
465 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
466 rather than a file system attribute.
468 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
469 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
470 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
471 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
473 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
474 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
475 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
477 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
478 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
479 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
482 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
486 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
489 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
491 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
494 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
495 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
496 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
497 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
499 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
500 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
505 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
506 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
508 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
509 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
510 duration after the initial signal was sent.
512 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
513 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
514 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
515 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
516 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
517 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
518 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
519 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
520 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
522 ** Changes in behavior
524 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
525 sequence when it would be a no-op.
527 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
528 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
531 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
535 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
536 of available processors, which may not have been the case
537 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
542 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
543 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
545 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
546 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
547 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
548 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
550 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
551 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
552 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
555 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
559 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
560 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
563 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
564 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
565 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
567 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
570 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
571 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
572 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
575 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
576 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
579 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
580 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
581 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
584 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
585 renamed-aside and then recreated.
586 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
588 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
589 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
590 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
591 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
593 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
594 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
597 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
598 processes will not intersperse their output.
599 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
602 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
606 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
609 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
610 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
612 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
613 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
614 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
615 the presence of the empty string argument.
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
618 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
619 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
620 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
621 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
623 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
626 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
627 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
628 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
630 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
631 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
632 and with a malicious user on the same system
633 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
637 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
641 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
642 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
645 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
646 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
647 offending directory and all "contents."
649 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
650 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
651 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
653 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
654 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
655 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
657 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
658 processes will not intersperse their output.
659 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
660 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
662 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
663 output the name of the file to stdout.
664 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
666 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
667 call fails with errno == EACCES.
668 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
670 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
671 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
674 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
675 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
676 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
678 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
679 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
680 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
681 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
682 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
683 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
685 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
686 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
687 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
688 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
690 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
691 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
693 ** Changes in behavior
695 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
696 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
697 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
698 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
699 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
701 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
702 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
703 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
704 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
706 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
708 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
709 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
710 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
711 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
712 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
716 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
720 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
721 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
723 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
724 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
726 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
727 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
728 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
730 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
731 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
734 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
738 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
739 when the source file doesn't have write access.
740 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
742 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
743 to accommodate leap seconds.
744 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
746 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
747 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
750 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
752 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
753 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
754 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
756 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
757 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
758 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
759 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
760 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
764 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
765 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
766 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
767 directory or a symlink to a directory.
769 ** Changes in behavior
771 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
772 environment variable is set.
774 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
775 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
776 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
780 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
781 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
782 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
783 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
785 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
786 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
787 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
788 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
792 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
793 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
794 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
796 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
797 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
798 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
799 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
800 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
801 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
804 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
805 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
808 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
812 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
813 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
814 and libraries tested at configure time.
815 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
817 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
818 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
820 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
821 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
823 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
824 printing a summary to stderr.
825 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
827 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
828 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
829 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
831 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
832 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
834 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
835 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
836 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
837 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
839 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
840 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
841 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
842 which is relatively unusual.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
845 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
846 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
847 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
848 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
849 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
850 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
851 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
855 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
856 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
857 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
858 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
859 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
863 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
864 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
866 ** Changes in behavior
868 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
869 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
870 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
871 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
872 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
879 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
880 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
882 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
883 before data copying has started.
885 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
886 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
888 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
889 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
890 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
891 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
893 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
894 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
895 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
896 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
898 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
903 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
904 for its standard streams.
906 ** Changes in behavior
908 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
909 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
910 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
911 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
912 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
913 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
915 ** Deprecated options
917 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
918 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
922 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
924 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
925 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
928 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
930 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
931 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
933 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
934 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
937 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
941 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
942 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
943 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
944 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
946 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
947 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
948 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
949 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
950 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
955 make check: two tests have been corrected
959 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
960 inherited from gnulib.
963 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
967 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
968 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
969 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
970 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
972 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
973 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
975 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
977 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
978 systems without xattr support.
980 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
981 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
982 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
984 ** Changes in behavior
986 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
987 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
988 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
989 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
991 ** Improved robustness
993 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
994 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
995 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
996 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
997 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
998 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
999 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1000 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1001 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1005 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1006 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1008 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1009 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1010 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1011 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1012 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1015 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1019 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1020 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1021 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1025 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1026 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1027 data was read, or on process exit.
1028 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1030 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1031 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1032 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1035 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1036 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1037 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1040 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1041 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1043 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1046 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1047 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1048 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1050 ** Changes in behavior
1052 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1053 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1054 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1056 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1057 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1059 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1060 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1061 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1064 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1068 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1070 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1071 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1072 install: Never copies xattrs
1074 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1075 from overwriting any existing destination file
1077 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1078 mode where this feature is available.
1080 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1081 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1082 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1083 do not modify the destination at all.
1085 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1087 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1091 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1094 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1096 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1097 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1099 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1100 processing the first file name
1102 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1103 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1104 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1105 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1107 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1108 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1110 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1111 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1114 ** Changes in behavior
1116 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1117 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1119 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1120 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1121 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1123 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1124 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1126 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1128 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1129 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1130 is still marked with a '+'.
1133 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1137 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1138 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1142 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1143 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1144 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1145 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1146 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1147 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1149 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1150 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1152 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1153 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1155 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1157 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1158 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1159 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1161 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1162 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1164 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1165 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1166 used to factor large numbers.
1168 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1171 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1173 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1175 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1176 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1178 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1179 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1180 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1181 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1183 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1184 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1185 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1187 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1188 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1192 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1194 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1195 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1197 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1198 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1200 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1202 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1203 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1207 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1208 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1209 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1211 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1213 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1214 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1215 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1217 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1218 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1219 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1221 ** Changes in behavior
1223 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1224 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1227 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1231 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1232 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1233 'futimens' system calls.
1237 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1239 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1240 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1241 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1243 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1244 with no USERNAME argument.
1246 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1247 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1248 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1250 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1251 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1252 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1253 number of fields for some inputs.
1255 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1256 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1258 ** Changes in behavior
1260 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1261 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1264 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1268 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1270 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1271 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1272 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1273 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1275 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1276 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1278 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1279 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1281 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1282 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1284 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1285 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1286 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1287 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1289 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1290 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1291 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1292 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1293 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1294 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1296 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1297 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1299 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1300 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1303 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1304 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1306 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1307 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1309 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1310 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1311 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1312 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1314 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1315 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1317 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1318 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1320 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1321 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1322 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1326 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1327 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1329 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1330 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1331 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1332 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1336 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1337 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1339 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1341 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1345 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1346 which have negative errno values.
1350 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1354 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1358 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1359 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1362 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1366 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1367 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1370 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1371 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1372 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1377 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1378 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1379 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1380 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1383 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1387 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1389 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1390 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1391 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1394 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1398 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1399 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1401 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1403 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1405 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1407 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1411 ** Changes in behavior
1413 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1414 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1416 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1417 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1419 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1420 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1421 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1425 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1426 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1427 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1428 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1429 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1430 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1431 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1432 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1433 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1434 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1435 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1437 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1438 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1439 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1442 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1445 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1446 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1447 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1449 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1450 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1451 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1454 ** New build options
1456 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1457 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1458 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1459 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1461 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1462 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1463 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1464 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1465 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1466 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1467 of "make check" fail.
1469 ** Remove deprecated options
1471 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1472 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1473 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1474 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1475 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1477 ** Improved robustness
1479 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1480 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1481 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1482 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1483 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1484 loss of the contents of a/f.
1486 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1487 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1491 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1492 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1493 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1495 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1496 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1497 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1498 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1500 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1501 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1502 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1503 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1504 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1505 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1506 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1507 destination is a symlink.
1509 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1511 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1512 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1514 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1515 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1517 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1519 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1520 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1522 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1523 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1525 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1528 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1529 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1531 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1532 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1534 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1535 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1536 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1537 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1539 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1540 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1541 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1543 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1544 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1545 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1547 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1548 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1549 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1550 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1552 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1553 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1554 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1556 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1557 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1559 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1560 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1562 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1564 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1565 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1566 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1568 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1569 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1571 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1572 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1574 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1575 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1577 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1578 [present in the original version]
1581 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1585 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1587 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1588 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1589 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1591 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1592 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1594 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1598 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1599 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1601 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1602 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1604 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1605 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1607 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1608 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1609 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1610 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1611 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1612 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1614 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1615 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1618 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1619 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1621 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1624 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1625 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1626 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1628 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1629 directory is unreadable.
1631 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1632 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1633 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1635 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1636 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1637 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1638 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1639 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1642 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1643 Before it would print nothing.
1645 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1647 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1648 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1649 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1650 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1651 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1652 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1653 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1654 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1656 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1660 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1661 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1662 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1664 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1665 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1666 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1667 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1670 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1674 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1675 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1676 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1677 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1678 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1679 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1680 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1682 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1683 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1684 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1685 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1686 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1687 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1688 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1689 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1691 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1692 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1693 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1696 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1700 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1701 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1703 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1704 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1705 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1707 ** Improved robustness
1709 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1710 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1711 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1714 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1718 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1719 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1720 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1721 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1722 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1724 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1728 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1731 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1735 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1736 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1737 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1738 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1740 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1741 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1743 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1744 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1745 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1748 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1750 ** Improved robustness
1752 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1753 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1755 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1756 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1757 or NFS-mounted partition.
1759 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1760 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1764 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1765 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1766 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1767 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1768 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1769 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1771 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1772 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1774 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1775 or neglect to report file removal.
1777 For the "groups" command:
1779 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1780 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1782 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1784 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1786 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1790 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1791 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1794 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1796 ** Changes in behavior
1798 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1799 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1800 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1801 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1803 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1804 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1805 a final `./' or `../' component.
1807 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1808 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1809 this only for pipes.
1811 ** Infrastructure changes
1813 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1814 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1815 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1816 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1820 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1821 name is "." or "..".
1823 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1824 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1825 dirent.d_type support.
1827 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1828 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1830 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1831 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1832 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1833 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1836 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1838 ** Changes in behavior
1840 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1844 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1845 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1849 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1850 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1851 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1853 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1854 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1856 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1857 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1859 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1861 ** Improved robustness
1863 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1864 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1865 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1867 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1868 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1871 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1872 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1874 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1875 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1877 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1878 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1880 ** Changes in behavior
1882 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1883 where the two are distinct.
1885 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1886 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1887 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1888 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1889 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1890 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1891 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1892 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1893 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1894 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1895 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1896 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1897 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1898 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1899 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1900 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1901 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1903 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1904 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1905 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1907 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1908 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1909 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1910 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1913 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1914 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1918 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1919 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1920 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1921 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1923 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1924 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1925 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1927 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1928 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1929 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1930 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1931 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1934 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1935 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1937 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1938 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1939 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1940 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1942 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1943 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1944 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1946 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1947 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1948 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1949 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1951 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1952 and sticky) with the -m option.
1954 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1955 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1956 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1957 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1958 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1960 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1961 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1963 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1967 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1968 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1969 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1970 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1972 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1974 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1976 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1977 silently ignoring one of them.
1979 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1980 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1981 containing this change was 5.92.
1983 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1984 automatically newline terminated.
1986 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1987 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1988 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1989 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1992 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1993 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1994 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1997 ** Scheduled for removal
1999 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2000 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2002 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2003 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2004 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2005 command to unlink a directory.
2007 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2008 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2009 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2010 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2014 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2015 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2016 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2017 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2018 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2019 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2023 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2024 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2026 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2028 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2029 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2030 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2032 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2033 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2036 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2037 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2039 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2040 list directories before files.
2042 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2043 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2044 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2045 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2048 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2050 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2052 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2053 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2054 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2056 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2057 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2061 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2062 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2063 usually printing nothing.
2065 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2067 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2068 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2069 them with hard-linked directories.
2071 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2072 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2073 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2075 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2076 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2077 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2079 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2082 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2083 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2085 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2086 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2088 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2089 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2091 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2092 all command-line arguments.
2094 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2096 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2098 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2099 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2101 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2103 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2104 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2105 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2106 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2107 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2109 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2110 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2112 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2113 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2114 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2115 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2117 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2119 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2123 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2124 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2126 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2127 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2129 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2130 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2132 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2133 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2135 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2136 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2138 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2140 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2141 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2142 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2145 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2147 ** Build-related bug fixes
2149 installing .mo files would fail
2152 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2156 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2158 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2161 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2165 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2166 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2170 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2172 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2173 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2175 ** Deprecated options
2177 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2178 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2180 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2184 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2186 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2187 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2188 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2189 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2191 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2194 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2200 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2205 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2207 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2209 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2210 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2211 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2213 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2214 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2215 problematic usages. These include:
2217 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2218 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2219 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2220 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2221 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2222 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2223 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2224 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2225 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2227 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2228 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2230 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2231 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2232 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2233 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2235 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2236 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2237 between binary and text files.
2239 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2243 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2247 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2248 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2250 head tac tail tee tr
2251 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2253 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2254 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2256 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2257 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2258 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2260 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2262 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2264 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2265 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2266 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2270 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2272 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2273 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2275 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2276 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2277 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2281 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2282 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2286 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2287 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2288 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2292 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2293 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2297 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2299 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2301 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2305 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2306 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2307 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2309 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2310 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2311 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2312 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2313 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2315 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2319 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2320 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2321 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2323 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2325 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2326 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2327 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2328 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2330 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2332 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2333 rather than silently wrapping around.
2335 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2336 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2338 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2339 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2341 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2342 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2343 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2344 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2346 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2348 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2350 ** Improved robustness
2352 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2353 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2354 no matter how large the result.
2356 ** Improved portability
2358 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2359 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2361 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2363 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2364 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2365 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2367 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2368 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2372 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2373 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2375 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2377 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2378 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2379 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2380 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2382 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2383 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2385 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2386 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2387 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2389 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2391 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2392 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2394 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2395 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2397 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2399 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2400 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2402 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2403 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2405 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2406 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2407 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2409 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2411 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2413 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2417 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2419 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2420 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2421 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2423 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2424 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2426 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2427 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2428 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2430 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2431 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2433 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2434 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2435 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2436 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2438 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2439 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2441 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2442 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2443 the file system does not support it.
2445 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2447 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2448 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2450 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2452 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2453 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2455 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2456 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2457 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2458 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2460 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2461 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2464 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2465 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2466 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2467 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2469 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2470 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2471 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2472 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2474 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2475 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2477 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2479 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2480 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2481 reporting incorrect results.
2485 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2486 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2488 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2491 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2493 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2494 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2496 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2497 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2499 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2502 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2503 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2504 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2505 the file name does not look like a page range.
2507 printf has several changes:
2509 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2510 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2512 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2513 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2514 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2516 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2517 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2520 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2521 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2523 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2524 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2526 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2528 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2529 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2531 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2533 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2535 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2536 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2537 when first encountering the directory.
2541 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2542 output; POSIX requires this.
2544 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2545 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2547 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2549 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2550 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2552 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2553 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2555 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2556 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2557 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2558 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2559 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2560 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2561 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2563 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2564 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2565 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2567 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2568 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2570 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2572 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2574 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2575 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2576 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2577 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2579 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2583 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2584 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2585 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2586 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2587 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2589 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2590 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2591 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2593 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2594 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2596 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2597 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2599 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2600 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2601 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2602 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2603 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2605 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2606 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2608 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2609 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2611 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2613 nocreat do not create the output file
2614 excl fail if the output file already exists
2615 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2616 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2618 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2620 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2621 direct use direct I/O for data
2622 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2623 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2624 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2625 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2626 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2628 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2630 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2631 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2634 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2635 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2636 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2637 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2638 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2639 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2641 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2642 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2644 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2647 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2649 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2651 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2652 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2654 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2655 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2656 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2658 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2659 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2660 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2662 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2664 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2665 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2667 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2668 for compatibility with bash.
2670 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2672 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2673 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2674 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2675 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2677 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2678 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2680 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2681 ls supports TABSIZE.
2682 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2683 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2684 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2686 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2689 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2691 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2692 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2693 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2694 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2695 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2696 an offset, not as a file name.
2698 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2699 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2701 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2702 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2704 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2705 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2707 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2708 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2709 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2711 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2712 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2714 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2715 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2719 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2721 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2723 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2727 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2728 or more arguments between partitions.
2730 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2731 holes in the destination.
2733 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2734 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2735 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2736 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2737 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2738 terminates immediately.
2740 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2742 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2744 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2745 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2746 not the empty string.
2748 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2749 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2753 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2754 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2755 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2758 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2765 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2769 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2770 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2772 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2773 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2775 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2776 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2777 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2780 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2784 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2785 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2787 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2788 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2790 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2791 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2792 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2794 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2796 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2799 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2801 ** Configuration option
2803 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2804 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2808 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2809 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2813 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2814 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2815 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2818 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2819 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2820 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2821 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2822 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2823 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2824 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2827 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2831 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2832 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2833 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2835 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2836 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2838 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2840 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2841 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2842 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2843 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2845 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2847 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2848 not just the ones that reference directories
2850 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2851 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2853 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2854 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2855 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2857 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2858 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2859 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2860 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2861 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2862 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2864 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2869 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2870 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2872 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2874 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2876 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2878 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2879 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2881 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2882 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2884 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2886 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2890 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2892 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2894 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2895 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2896 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2897 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2898 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2900 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2901 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2903 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2904 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2906 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2907 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2909 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2910 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2911 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2915 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2916 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2917 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2918 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2919 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2920 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2921 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2922 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2923 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2924 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2925 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2926 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2927 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2928 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2930 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2932 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2933 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2935 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2937 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2939 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2940 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2942 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2944 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2945 without a trailing newline.
2947 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2948 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2950 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2953 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2957 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2959 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2961 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2962 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2963 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2964 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2966 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2968 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2969 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2970 be printed without leading spaces.
2972 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2973 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2978 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2979 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2980 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2982 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2984 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2985 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2987 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2988 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2990 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2991 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2993 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2995 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2997 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2999 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
3000 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3002 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3004 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3006 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3007 byte offsets are specified.
3010 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3013 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
3016 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3017 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3018 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3019 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3020 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3021 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3022 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3023 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3024 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3025 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3026 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3027 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3028 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3029 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3030 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3031 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3032 directory where M has write access.
3033 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3034 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3035 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3038 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3039 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3040 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3041 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3042 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3043 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3044 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3045 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3046 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3047 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3048 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3049 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3050 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3051 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3052 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3053 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3054 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3055 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3056 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3057 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3058 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3059 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3060 appeared one additional time.
3062 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3063 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3064 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3065 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3068 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3069 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3070 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3071 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3072 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3073 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3074 if there were more than 338.
3076 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3077 - false --help now exits nonzero
3080 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3081 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3082 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3083 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3086 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3087 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3088 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3089 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3090 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3093 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3094 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3095 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3096 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3097 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3098 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3099 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3102 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3103 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3104 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3105 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3106 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3107 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3109 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3110 under certain unusual conditions
3111 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3112 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3115 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3116 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3117 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3118 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3119 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3120 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3121 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3122 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3123 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3124 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3125 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3126 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3127 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3128 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3129 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3130 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3133 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3134 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3137 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3138 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3139 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3140 involving hard-linked directories
3141 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3142 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3143 character-special and block files
3146 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3147 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3148 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3149 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3150 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3151 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3152 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3153 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3154 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3156 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3157 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3158 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3159 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3160 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3161 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3162 specified on the command line.
3163 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3164 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3165 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3166 the first file untouched.
3167 * readlink: new program
3168 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3169 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3170 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3171 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3172 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3173 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3176 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3177 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3178 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3179 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3180 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3181 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3182 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3183 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3184 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3185 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3186 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3187 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3189 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3190 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3191 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3193 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3194 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3195 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3196 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3197 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3198 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3199 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3200 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3203 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3204 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3207 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3208 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3209 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3210 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3211 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3212 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3213 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3216 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3217 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3219 ========================================================================
3220 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3221 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3224 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3226 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3227 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3228 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3229 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3230 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3231 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3232 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3233 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3234 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3235 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3236 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3237 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3239 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3240 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3241 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3242 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3244 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3247 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3249 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3250 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3251 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3252 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3253 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3254 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3255 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3258 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3259 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3260 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3261 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3262 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3263 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3264 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3265 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3266 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3267 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3268 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3269 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3270 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3271 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3272 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3273 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3275 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3276 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3278 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3279 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3280 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3281 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3282 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3283 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3285 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3286 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3287 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3288 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3289 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3290 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3291 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3293 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3294 the source files in the following example:
3295 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3296 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3297 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3298 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3299 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3300 links between source files with --preserve=links
3301 * cp accepts new options:
3302 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3303 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3304 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3305 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3306 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3307 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3308 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3309 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3310 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3312 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3313 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3314 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3315 even though it's older than dest.
3316 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3317 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3318 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3319 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3320 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3322 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3323 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3324 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3325 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3326 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3327 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3328 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3330 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3331 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3332 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3334 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3335 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3336 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3337 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3338 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3339 This is the default.
3341 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3342 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3343 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3344 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3345 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3347 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3350 ========================================================================
3351 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3352 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3355 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3356 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3358 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3359 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3360 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3361 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3362 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3364 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3365 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3366 that specifies a non-directory
3369 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3370 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3371 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3372 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3373 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3374 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3375 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3376 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3377 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3378 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3379 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3380 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3381 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3382 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3383 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3384 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3385 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3386 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3387 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3388 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3389 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3390 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3391 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3392 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3394 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3395 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3396 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3398 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3400 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3401 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3403 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3404 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3405 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3406 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3407 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3409 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3410 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3411 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3412 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3413 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3415 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3417 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3418 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3419 * still more portability fixes
3420 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3421 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3423 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3425 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3427 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3429 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3430 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3431 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3432 there is any time remaining
3433 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3435 ========================================================================
3436 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3437 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3439 This package began as the union of the following:
3440 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3442 ========================================================================
3444 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3446 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3447 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3448 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3449 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3450 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3451 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.