1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
15 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
16 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
19 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
20 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
21 before adjusting it to the correct value.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
24 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
25 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
28 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
29 and B is in some other file system.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
32 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
33 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
34 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
36 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
37 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
39 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
40 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
41 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
42 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
43 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
45 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
46 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
49 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
50 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
53 ** Changes in behavior
55 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
56 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
57 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
59 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
60 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
61 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
62 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
64 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
65 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
67 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
68 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
69 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
71 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
72 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
74 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
75 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
76 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
77 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
78 though they still work.
80 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
81 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
82 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
84 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
85 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
87 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
88 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
89 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
91 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
92 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
93 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
94 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
98 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
99 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
101 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
102 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
104 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
105 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
109 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
110 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
112 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
113 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
114 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
117 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
119 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
120 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
121 since synchronizing can take a long time.
123 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
125 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
126 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
128 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
130 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
131 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
132 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
136 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
137 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
140 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
144 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
145 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
147 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
148 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
149 is a non regular file.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
152 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
153 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
154 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
156 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
159 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
160 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
162 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
163 heavily changed during the run.
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
166 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
169 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
172 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
175 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
178 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
179 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
180 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
182 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
185 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
186 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
188 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
189 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
192 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
193 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
194 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
196 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
197 invalid combinations of case character classes.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
200 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
201 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
202 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
204 ** Changes in behavior
206 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
208 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
209 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
210 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
212 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
213 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
214 that was made in release 8.32.
216 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
217 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
218 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
220 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
221 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
223 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
224 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
228 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
229 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
230 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
231 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
233 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
235 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
236 when verifying tagged format checksums.
238 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
240 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
241 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
243 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
244 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
246 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
247 NUL instead of newline.
249 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
251 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
252 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
253 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
257 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
258 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
260 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
261 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
262 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
264 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
265 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
267 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
268 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
270 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
271 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
273 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
274 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
275 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
277 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
279 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
280 where avx2 instructions are supported.
281 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
284 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
288 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
289 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
290 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
292 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
293 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
294 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
295 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
296 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
298 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
299 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
300 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
301 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
302 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
303 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
305 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
308 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
309 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
310 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
313 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
314 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
315 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
318 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
319 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
321 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
322 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
323 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
326 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
327 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
328 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
330 ** Changes in behavior
332 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
333 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
334 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
335 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
336 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
339 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
340 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
341 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
342 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
343 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
344 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
345 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
346 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
349 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
350 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
351 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
352 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
354 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
355 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
356 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
358 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
359 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
363 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
364 file creation time, where available.
366 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
367 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
369 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
370 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
371 useful on network file systems.
375 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
376 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
378 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
379 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
380 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
384 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
387 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
391 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
394 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
395 after asking the user whether to proceed.
396 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
398 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
399 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
401 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
402 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
405 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
406 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
407 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
408 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
409 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
410 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
412 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
413 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
415 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
418 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
419 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
420 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
422 ** Changes in behavior
424 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
425 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
426 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
427 end-of-options marker.
429 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
432 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
433 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
435 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
436 environment variable is set.
438 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
439 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
440 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
441 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
442 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
444 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
446 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
447 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
448 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
449 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
451 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
452 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
456 id now supports specifying multiple users.
458 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
459 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
461 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
462 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
463 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
464 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
465 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
466 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
468 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
469 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
471 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
472 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
474 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
475 signal handling before executing a program.
479 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
480 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
481 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
485 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
486 which is common in Asian locales.
488 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
489 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
491 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
492 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
495 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
499 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
500 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
501 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
502 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
503 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
504 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
506 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
507 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
508 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
509 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
511 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
512 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
513 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
514 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
515 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
516 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
518 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
519 even if it can't be traversed.
520 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
522 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
523 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
524 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
526 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
529 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
530 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
531 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
532 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
533 now silently does nothing if A exists.
534 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
536 ** Changes in behavior
538 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
539 it is self referential.
541 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
545 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
547 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
548 each processing step.
550 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
551 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
554 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
555 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
556 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
558 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
559 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
563 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
564 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
566 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
567 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
568 and tail -f uses inotify.
570 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
571 which is especially significant on macOS.
574 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
578 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
579 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
581 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
582 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
583 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
584 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
586 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
589 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
590 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
592 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
593 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
594 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
596 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
597 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
599 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
600 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
603 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
604 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
605 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
606 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
611 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
615 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
617 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
618 rather than reading from the start.
620 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
621 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
622 for unknown long options.
626 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
627 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
630 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
634 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
635 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
636 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
637 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
639 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
640 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
641 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
642 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
643 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
645 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
646 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
647 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
648 now fails instead of losing the data.
649 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
651 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
652 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
653 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
655 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
656 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
659 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
660 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
663 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
664 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
667 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
668 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
671 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
672 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
673 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
675 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
676 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
677 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
679 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
680 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
683 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
686 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
687 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
690 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
691 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
693 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
694 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
695 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
696 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
698 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
699 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
700 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
702 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
703 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
706 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
707 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
711 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
712 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
713 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
715 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
716 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
718 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
719 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
721 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
722 executing the subsidiary program.
724 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
726 ** Changes in behavior
728 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
729 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
730 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
731 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
735 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
737 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
738 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
740 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
741 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
742 is effective in this case.
745 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
749 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
750 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
751 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
753 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
754 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
757 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
758 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
759 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
761 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
762 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
765 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
766 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
767 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
769 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
770 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
771 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
772 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
773 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
775 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
776 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
777 depending on the size of the first file processed.
778 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
782 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
783 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
784 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
785 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
787 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
788 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
789 time zone is indeterminate.
791 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
792 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
793 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
794 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
796 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
797 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
798 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
800 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
801 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
803 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
804 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
805 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
809 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
810 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
811 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
814 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
818 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
819 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
822 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
823 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
826 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
827 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
828 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
829 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
830 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
832 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
833 System V style platforms where this information is available only
834 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
836 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
837 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
839 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
840 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
841 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
843 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
844 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
845 defaults to a different SELinux context.
847 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
848 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
850 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
851 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
852 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
854 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
855 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
857 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
858 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
859 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
861 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
863 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
864 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
866 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
867 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
869 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
870 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
872 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
873 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
875 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
876 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
877 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
878 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
880 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
881 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
882 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
884 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
885 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
886 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
888 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
889 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
892 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
893 only doing so if --retry is specified.
894 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
896 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
899 ** Changes in behavior
901 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
903 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
904 values for any argument.
906 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
907 they are out of localtime range.
909 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
910 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
911 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
912 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
916 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
917 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
918 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
920 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
921 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
923 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
924 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
926 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
928 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
929 written to a terminal.
931 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
932 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
934 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
935 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
936 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
937 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
938 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
939 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
940 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
941 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
942 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
943 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
944 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
946 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
947 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
951 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
952 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
956 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
958 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
959 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
961 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
964 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
968 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
969 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
970 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
973 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
976 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
977 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
980 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
981 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
983 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
984 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
985 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
987 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
988 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
990 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
991 that specify an offset for the first field.
992 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
994 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
995 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
999 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1000 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1004 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1005 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1007 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1008 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1009 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1010 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1011 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1013 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1014 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1015 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1017 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1018 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1019 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1021 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1022 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1024 ** Changes in behavior
1026 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1027 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1029 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1030 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1032 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1033 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1035 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1036 when outputting to a terminal.
1038 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1042 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1043 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1045 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1046 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1048 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1049 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1050 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1052 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1053 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1055 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1056 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1057 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1059 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1061 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1062 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1063 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1065 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1066 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1069 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1073 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1074 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1076 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1077 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1079 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1080 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1081 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1083 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1084 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1085 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1086 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1088 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1089 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1090 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1091 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1093 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1094 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1096 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1097 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1099 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1100 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1101 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1103 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1104 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1105 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1107 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1108 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1109 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1111 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1112 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1113 character at the 4GiB position.
1114 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1116 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1117 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1119 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1120 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1122 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1123 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1126 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1129 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1130 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1131 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1133 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1134 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1136 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1137 when those files are being created or renamed.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1142 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1143 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1144 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1145 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1147 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1148 on stderr approximately every second.
1150 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1151 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1153 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1154 other than the default newline character.
1156 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1157 a useful setting with high latency links.
1159 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1160 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1162 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1163 and output errors in general.
1165 ** Changes in behavior
1167 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1168 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1169 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1170 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1172 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1173 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1174 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1175 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1176 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1178 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1179 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1181 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1183 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1184 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1186 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1187 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1191 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1192 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1194 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1195 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1197 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1198 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1200 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1201 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1203 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1205 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1206 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1207 documentation are provided.
1210 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1214 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1217 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1218 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1219 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1222 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1223 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1224 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1225 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1227 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1228 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1230 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1231 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1233 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1234 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1235 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1236 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1237 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1238 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1239 values are in octal.
1252 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1254 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1255 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1256 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1257 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1258 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1259 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1261 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1262 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1263 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1266 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1267 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1270 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1271 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1272 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1273 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1275 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1276 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1277 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1279 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1280 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1281 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1283 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1284 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1285 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1286 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1289 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1290 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1291 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1293 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1294 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1296 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1297 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1298 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1300 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1301 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1303 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1304 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1306 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1307 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1309 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1310 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1312 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1313 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1316 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1317 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1321 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1322 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1324 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1325 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1326 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1327 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1328 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1329 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1330 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1331 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1332 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1333 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1334 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1335 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1336 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1337 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1338 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1339 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1340 it suitable for embedded system.
1342 ** Changes in behavior
1344 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1345 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1347 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1348 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1350 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1351 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1352 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1354 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1355 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1356 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1360 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1361 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1362 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1364 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1366 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1367 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1368 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1370 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1371 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1372 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1373 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1375 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1376 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1378 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1379 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1380 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1383 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1387 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1388 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1389 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1391 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1392 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1393 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1394 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1396 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1397 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1398 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1400 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1401 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1403 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1405 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1406 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1407 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1409 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1410 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1411 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1413 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1414 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1415 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1416 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1418 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1419 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1420 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1422 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1423 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1424 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1426 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1427 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1429 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1430 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1431 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1432 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1434 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1435 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1436 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1438 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1439 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1440 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1444 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1445 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1446 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1448 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1449 used to identify the split points.
1451 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1452 command line argument through to the output.
1454 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1457 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1458 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1460 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1461 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1463 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1465 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1466 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1467 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1469 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1470 unique groups with empty lines.
1472 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1473 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1475 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1478 ** Changes in behavior
1480 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1481 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1482 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1483 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1485 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1486 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1488 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1489 not just the transfer counts.
1491 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1493 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1494 as per the documented interface.
1498 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1500 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1501 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1502 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1503 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1505 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1506 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1507 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1508 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1510 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1511 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1512 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1514 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1515 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1517 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1518 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1520 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1524 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1527 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1531 numfmt: reformat numbers
1535 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1536 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1537 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1539 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1540 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1541 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1543 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1544 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1548 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1549 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1551 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1552 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1553 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1555 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1556 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1557 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1559 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1560 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1561 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1563 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1564 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1565 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1567 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1568 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1569 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1571 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1572 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1574 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1575 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1577 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1578 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1579 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1581 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1582 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1583 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1585 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1586 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1587 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1589 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1590 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1591 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1592 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1594 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1595 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1596 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1598 ** Changes in behavior
1600 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1601 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1602 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1603 'total' in the target column.
1605 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1606 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1607 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1609 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1610 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1612 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1613 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1617 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1618 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1620 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1621 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1623 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1627 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1628 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1629 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1630 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1631 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1632 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1633 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1634 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1635 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1636 for a patched distribution package.
1638 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1639 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1641 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1642 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1643 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1644 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1647 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1651 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1653 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1654 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1655 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1659 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1660 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1661 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1662 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1663 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1665 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1666 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1668 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1669 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1670 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1671 eventually exits nonzero.
1673 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1674 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1675 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1676 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1677 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1679 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1680 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1681 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1683 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1684 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1685 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1687 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1688 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1689 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1691 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1692 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1693 Before, this would infloop:
1694 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1695 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1697 ** Changes in behavior
1699 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1703 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1704 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1705 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1706 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1707 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1710 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1711 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1712 format-changing options.
1714 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1715 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1716 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1717 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1718 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1722 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1723 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1724 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1725 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1726 are run without following the instructions in README.
1728 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1729 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1730 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1731 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1732 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1733 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1734 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1737 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1741 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1742 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1743 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1744 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1746 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1747 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1748 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1749 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1751 sort -u could read freed memory.
1752 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1753 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1754 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1758 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1759 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1760 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1761 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1764 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1768 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1769 processes will not intersperse their output.
1770 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1772 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1773 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1774 date: invalid date '\260'
1775 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1777 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1778 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1779 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1780 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1782 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1783 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1784 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1786 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1787 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1788 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1789 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1790 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1791 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1793 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1794 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1796 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1797 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1799 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1800 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1801 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1803 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1804 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1805 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1809 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1811 ** Changes in behavior
1813 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1814 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1815 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1816 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1817 have any reason to include it here.
1821 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1822 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1823 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1825 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1826 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1827 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1830 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1834 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1835 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1836 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1837 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1838 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1839 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1841 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1842 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1843 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1844 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1845 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1846 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1847 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1849 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1850 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1852 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1853 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1857 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1858 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1860 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1862 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1864 ** Changes in behavior
1866 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1867 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1868 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1870 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1871 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1874 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1878 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1879 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1880 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1881 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1882 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1883 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1884 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1885 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1887 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1888 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1889 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1890 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1891 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1893 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1894 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1896 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1897 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1899 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1900 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1902 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1903 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1905 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1906 additional static suffix to output file names.
1908 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1909 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1910 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1912 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1913 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1917 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1918 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1921 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1922 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1923 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1924 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1925 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1926 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1928 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1929 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1930 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1931 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1932 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1934 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1935 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1936 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1937 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1941 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1942 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1943 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1945 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1946 instead of causing a usage failure.
1948 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1951 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1955 realpath: print resolved file names.
1959 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1960 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1962 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1963 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1965 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1966 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1967 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1968 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1969 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1970 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1972 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1973 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1974 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1976 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1977 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1980 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1981 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1982 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1983 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1984 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1986 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1988 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1989 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1991 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1992 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1993 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1995 ** Changes in behavior
1997 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1998 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1999 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2000 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2001 usually-short referent instead.
2003 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2004 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2005 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2006 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2009 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2013 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2014 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2015 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2017 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2018 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2020 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2021 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2025 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2026 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2028 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2029 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2030 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2031 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2033 ** Changes in behavior
2035 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2036 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2037 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2041 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2042 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2043 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2046 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2050 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2051 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2052 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2054 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2055 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2057 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2058 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2059 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2060 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2061 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2063 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2064 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2065 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2066 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2067 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2068 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2069 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2070 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2072 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2073 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2075 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2076 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2078 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2079 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2081 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2082 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2083 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2085 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2086 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2087 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2088 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2090 ** Changes in behavior
2092 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2093 when -v or -c specified.
2095 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2096 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2100 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2101 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2102 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2103 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2104 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2106 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2107 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2108 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2110 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2111 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2112 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2113 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2114 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2115 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2116 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2118 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2119 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2120 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2124 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2125 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2127 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2130 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2131 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2133 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2134 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2136 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2137 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2139 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2141 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2145 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2146 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2148 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2151 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2155 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2156 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2158 ** Changes in behavior
2160 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2161 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2162 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2163 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2164 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2165 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2166 resolved for 2.6.39.
2167 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2168 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2169 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2173 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2176 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2180 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2181 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2184 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2185 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2188 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2189 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2190 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2192 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2193 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2195 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2198 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2199 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2201 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2202 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2206 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2207 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2208 processed portion thereof.
2210 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2211 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2213 ** Changes in behavior
2215 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2216 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2217 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2219 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2220 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2221 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2223 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2224 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2226 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2227 Use --preserve-context instead.
2229 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2232 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2236 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2237 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2238 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2239 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2240 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2242 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2243 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2245 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2246 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2247 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2249 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2250 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2252 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2253 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2257 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2258 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2259 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2260 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2261 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2262 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2263 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2264 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2266 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2267 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2268 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2270 ** Changes in behavior
2272 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2273 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2274 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2277 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2281 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2282 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2286 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2290 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2291 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2293 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2294 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2296 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2297 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2299 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2300 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2301 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2302 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2304 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2305 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2307 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2308 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2309 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2311 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2313 ** Changes in behavior
2315 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2316 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2317 to the number of available processors.
2321 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2322 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2323 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2326 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2330 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2331 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2332 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2333 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2335 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2336 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2337 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2339 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2340 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2342 ** Changes in behavior
2344 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2345 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2347 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2348 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2349 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2350 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2351 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2352 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2354 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2355 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2356 the same way as the others.
2358 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2359 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2362 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2366 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2367 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2368 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2370 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2371 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2373 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2374 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2375 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2377 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2378 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2380 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2381 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2383 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2384 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2385 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2387 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2388 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2389 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2390 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2394 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2395 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2397 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2400 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2401 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2403 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2405 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2406 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2407 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2409 ** Changes in behavior
2411 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2412 rather than its aliased target.
2414 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2415 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2416 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2418 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2419 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2420 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2421 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2422 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2423 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2424 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2425 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2427 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2429 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2431 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2432 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2435 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2436 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2437 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2438 control like taskset for example.
2440 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2442 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2443 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2444 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2445 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2446 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2447 includes %C when context information is available.
2449 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2450 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2451 rather than a file system attribute.
2453 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2454 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2455 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2456 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2458 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2459 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2460 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2462 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2463 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2464 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2467 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2471 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2474 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2476 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2477 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2479 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2480 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2481 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2482 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2484 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2485 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2490 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2491 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2493 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2494 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2495 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2497 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2498 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2499 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2500 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2501 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2502 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2503 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2504 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2505 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2507 ** Changes in behavior
2509 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2510 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2512 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2513 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2516 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2520 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2521 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2522 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2523 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2527 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2528 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2530 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2531 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2532 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2533 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2535 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2536 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2537 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2540 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2544 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2545 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2546 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2548 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2549 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2550 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2552 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2553 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2555 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2556 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2557 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2558 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2560 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2561 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2564 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2565 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2566 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2567 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2569 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2570 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2571 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2573 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2574 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2575 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2576 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2578 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2579 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2580 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2582 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2583 processes will not intersperse their output.
2584 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2587 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2591 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2594 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2597 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2598 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2599 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2600 the presence of the empty string argument.
2601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2603 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2604 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2605 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2606 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2608 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2609 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2611 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2612 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2613 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2615 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2616 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2617 and with a malicious user on the same system
2618 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2619 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2622 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2626 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2627 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2628 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2630 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2631 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2632 offending directory and all "contents."
2634 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2635 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2636 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2638 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2639 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2640 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2642 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2643 processes will not intersperse their output.
2644 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2645 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2647 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2648 output the name of the file to stdout.
2649 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2651 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2652 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2653 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2655 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2656 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2659 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2660 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2661 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2663 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2664 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2665 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2666 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2667 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2668 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2670 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2671 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2672 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2673 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2675 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2676 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2678 ** Changes in behavior
2680 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2681 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2682 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2683 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2684 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2686 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2687 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2688 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2689 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2691 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2693 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2694 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2695 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2696 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2697 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2701 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2705 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2706 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2708 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2709 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2711 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2712 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2713 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2715 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2716 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2719 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2723 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2724 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2725 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2727 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2728 to accommodate leap seconds.
2729 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2731 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2732 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2733 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2735 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2737 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2738 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2739 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2741 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2742 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2743 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2744 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2745 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2749 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2750 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2751 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2752 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2754 ** Changes in behavior
2756 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2757 environment variable is set.
2759 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2760 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2761 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2765 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2766 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2767 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2768 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2770 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2771 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2772 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2773 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2777 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2778 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2779 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2781 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2782 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2783 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2784 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2785 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2786 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2787 another improvement:
2789 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2790 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2793 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2797 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2798 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2799 and libraries tested at configure time.
2800 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2802 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2803 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2805 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2806 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2808 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2809 printing a summary to stderr.
2810 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2812 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2813 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2814 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2816 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2817 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2819 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2820 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2821 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2822 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2824 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2825 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2826 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2827 which is relatively unusual.
2828 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2830 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2831 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2832 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2833 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2834 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2835 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2836 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2840 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2841 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2842 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2843 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2844 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2848 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2849 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2851 ** Changes in behavior
2853 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2854 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2855 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2856 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2857 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2860 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2864 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2865 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2867 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2868 before data copying has started.
2870 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2871 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2873 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2874 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2875 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2876 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2878 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2879 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2880 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2881 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2883 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2888 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2889 for its standard streams.
2891 ** Changes in behavior
2893 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2894 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2895 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2896 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2897 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2898 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2900 ** Deprecated options
2902 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2903 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2907 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2909 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2910 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2911 a btrfs file system.
2913 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2915 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2916 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2918 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2919 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2922 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2926 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2927 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2928 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2929 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2931 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2932 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2933 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2934 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2935 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2940 make check: two tests have been corrected
2944 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2945 inherited from gnulib.
2948 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2952 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2953 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2954 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2955 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2957 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2958 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2960 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2962 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2963 systems without xattr support.
2965 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2966 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2967 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2969 ** Changes in behavior
2971 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2972 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2973 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2974 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2976 ** Improved robustness
2978 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2979 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2980 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2981 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2982 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2983 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2984 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2985 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2986 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2990 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2991 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2993 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2994 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2995 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2996 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2997 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3000 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3004 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3005 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3006 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3010 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3011 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3012 data was read, or on process exit.
3013 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3015 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3016 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3017 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3018 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3020 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3021 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3022 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3023 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3025 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3026 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3028 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3029 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3031 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3032 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3033 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3035 ** Changes in behavior
3037 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3038 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3039 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3041 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3042 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3044 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3045 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3046 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3049 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3053 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3055 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3056 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3057 install: Never copies xattrs
3059 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3060 from overwriting any existing destination file
3062 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3063 mode where this feature is available.
3065 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3066 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3067 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3068 do not modify the destination at all.
3070 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3072 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3076 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3077 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3079 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3081 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3082 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3084 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3085 processing the first file name
3087 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3088 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3089 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3090 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3092 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3093 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3095 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3096 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3099 ** Changes in behavior
3101 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3102 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3104 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3105 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3106 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3108 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3109 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3111 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3113 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3114 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3115 is still marked with a '+'.
3118 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3122 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3123 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3127 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3128 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3129 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3130 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3131 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3132 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3134 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3135 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3137 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3138 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3140 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3142 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3143 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3144 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3146 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3147 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3149 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3150 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3151 used to factor large numbers.
3153 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3156 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3158 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3160 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3161 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3163 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3164 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3165 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3166 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3168 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3169 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3170 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3172 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3173 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3177 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3179 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3180 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3182 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3183 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3185 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3187 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3188 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3192 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3193 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3194 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3196 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3198 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3199 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3200 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3202 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3203 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3204 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3206 ** Changes in behavior
3208 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3209 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3212 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3216 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3217 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3218 'futimens' system calls.
3222 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3224 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3225 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3226 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3228 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3229 with no USERNAME argument.
3231 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3232 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3233 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3235 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3236 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3237 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3238 number of fields for some inputs.
3240 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3241 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3243 ** Changes in behavior
3245 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3246 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3249 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3253 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3255 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3256 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3257 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3258 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3260 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3261 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3263 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3264 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3266 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3267 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3269 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3270 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3271 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3272 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3274 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3275 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3276 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3277 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3278 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3279 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3281 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3282 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3284 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3285 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3286 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3288 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3289 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3291 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3292 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3294 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3295 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3296 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3297 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3299 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3300 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3302 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3303 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3305 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3306 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3307 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3311 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3312 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3314 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3315 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3316 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3317 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3321 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3322 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3324 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3326 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3330 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3331 which have negative errno values.
3335 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3339 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3343 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3347 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3351 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3352 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3353 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3355 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3356 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3357 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3358 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3362 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3363 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3364 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3365 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3368 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3372 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3374 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3375 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3376 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3379 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3383 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3384 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3386 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3388 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3390 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3392 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3396 ** Changes in behavior
3398 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3399 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3401 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3402 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3404 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3405 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3406 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3410 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3411 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3412 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3413 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3414 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3415 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3416 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3417 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3418 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3419 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3420 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3422 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3423 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3424 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3427 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3430 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3431 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3432 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3434 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3435 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3436 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3439 ** New build options
3441 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3442 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3443 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3444 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3446 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3447 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3448 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3449 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3450 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3451 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3452 of "make check" fail.
3454 ** Remove deprecated options
3456 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3457 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3458 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3459 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3460 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3462 ** Improved robustness
3464 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3465 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3466 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3467 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3468 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3469 loss of the contents of a/f.
3471 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3472 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3476 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3477 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3478 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3480 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3481 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3482 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3483 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3485 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3486 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3487 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3488 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3489 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3490 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3491 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3492 destination is a symlink.
3494 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3496 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3497 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3499 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3500 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3502 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3504 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3505 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3507 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3508 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3510 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3513 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3514 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3516 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3517 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3519 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3520 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3521 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3522 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3524 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3525 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3526 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3528 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3529 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3530 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3532 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3533 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3534 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3535 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3537 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3538 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3539 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3541 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3542 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3544 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3545 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3547 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3549 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3550 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3551 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3553 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3554 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3556 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3557 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3559 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3560 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3562 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3563 [present in the original version]
3566 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3570 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3572 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3573 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3574 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3576 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3577 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3579 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3583 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3584 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3586 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3587 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3589 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3590 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3592 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3593 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3594 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3595 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3596 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3597 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3599 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3600 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3603 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3604 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3606 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3609 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3610 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3611 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3613 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3614 directory is unreadable.
3616 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3617 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3618 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3620 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3621 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3622 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3623 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3624 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3627 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3628 Before it would print nothing.
3630 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3632 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3633 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3634 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3635 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3636 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3637 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3638 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3639 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3641 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3645 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3646 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3647 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3649 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3650 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3651 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3652 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3655 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3659 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3660 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3661 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3662 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3663 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3664 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3665 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3667 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3668 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3669 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3670 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3671 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3672 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3673 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3674 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3676 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3677 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3678 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3681 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3685 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3686 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3688 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3689 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3690 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3692 ** Improved robustness
3694 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3695 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3696 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3699 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3703 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3704 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3705 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3706 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3707 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3709 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3713 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3716 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3720 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3721 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3722 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3723 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3725 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3726 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3728 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3729 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3730 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3733 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3735 ** Improved robustness
3737 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3738 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3740 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3741 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3742 or NFS-mounted partition.
3744 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3745 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3749 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3750 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3751 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3752 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3753 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3754 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3756 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3757 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3759 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3760 or neglect to report file removal.
3762 For the "groups" command:
3764 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3765 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3767 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3769 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3771 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3775 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3776 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3779 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3781 ** Changes in behavior
3783 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3784 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3785 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3786 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3788 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3789 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3790 a final './' or '../' component.
3792 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3793 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3794 this only for pipes.
3796 ** Infrastructure changes
3798 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3799 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3800 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3801 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3805 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3806 name is "." or "..".
3808 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3809 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3810 dirent.d_type support.
3812 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3813 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3815 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3816 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3817 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3818 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3821 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3823 ** Changes in behavior
3825 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3829 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3830 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3834 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3835 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3836 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3838 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3839 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3841 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3842 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3844 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3846 ** Improved robustness
3848 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3849 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3850 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3852 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3853 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3856 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3857 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3859 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3860 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3862 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3863 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3865 ** Changes in behavior
3867 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3868 where the two are distinct.
3870 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3871 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3872 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3873 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3874 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3875 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3876 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3877 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3878 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3879 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3880 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3881 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3882 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3883 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3884 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3885 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3886 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3888 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3889 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3890 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3892 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3893 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3894 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3895 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3898 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3899 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3903 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3904 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3905 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3906 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3908 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3909 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3910 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3912 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3913 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3914 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3915 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3916 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3919 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3920 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3922 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3923 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3924 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3925 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3927 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3928 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3929 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3931 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3932 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3933 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3934 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3936 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3937 and sticky) with the -m option.
3939 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3940 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3941 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3942 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3943 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3945 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3946 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3948 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3952 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3953 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3954 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3955 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3957 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3959 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3961 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3962 silently ignoring one of them.
3964 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3965 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3966 containing this change was 5.92.
3968 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3969 automatically newline terminated.
3971 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3972 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3973 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3974 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3977 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3978 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3979 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3982 ** Scheduled for removal
3984 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3985 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3987 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3988 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3989 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3990 command to unlink a directory.
3992 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3993 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3994 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3995 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3999 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4000 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4001 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4002 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4003 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4004 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4008 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4009 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4011 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4013 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4014 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4015 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4017 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4018 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4021 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4022 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4024 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4025 list directories before files.
4027 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4028 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4029 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4030 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4033 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4035 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4037 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4038 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4039 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4041 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4042 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4046 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4047 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4048 usually printing nothing.
4050 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4052 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4053 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4054 them with hard-linked directories.
4056 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4057 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4058 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4060 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4061 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4062 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4064 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4067 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4068 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4070 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4071 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4073 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4074 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4076 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4077 all command-line arguments.
4079 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4081 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4083 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4084 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4086 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4088 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4089 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4090 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4091 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4092 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4094 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4095 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4097 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4098 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4099 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4100 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4102 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4104 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4108 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4109 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4111 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4112 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4114 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4115 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4117 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4118 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4120 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4121 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4123 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4125 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4126 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4127 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4130 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4132 ** Build-related bug fixes
4134 installing .mo files would fail
4137 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4141 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4143 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4146 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4150 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4151 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4155 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4157 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4158 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4160 ** Deprecated options
4162 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4163 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4165 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4169 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4171 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4172 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4173 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4174 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4176 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4179 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4185 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4190 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4192 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4194 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4195 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4196 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4198 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4199 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4200 problematic usages. These include:
4202 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4203 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4204 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4205 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4206 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4207 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4208 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4209 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4210 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4212 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4213 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4215 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4216 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4217 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4218 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4220 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4221 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4222 between binary and text files.
4224 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4228 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4232 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4233 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4235 head tac tail tee tr
4236 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4238 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4239 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4241 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4242 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4243 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4245 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4247 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4249 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4250 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4251 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4255 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4257 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4258 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4260 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4261 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4262 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4266 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4267 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4271 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4272 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4273 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4277 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4278 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4282 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4284 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4286 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4290 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4291 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4292 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4294 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4295 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4296 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4297 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4298 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4300 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4304 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4305 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4306 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4308 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4310 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4311 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4312 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4313 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4315 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4317 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4318 rather than silently wrapping around.
4320 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4321 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4323 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4324 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4326 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4327 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4328 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4329 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4331 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4333 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4335 ** Improved robustness
4337 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4338 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4339 no matter how large the result.
4341 ** Improved portability
4343 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4344 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4346 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4348 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4349 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4350 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4352 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4353 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4357 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4358 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4360 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4362 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4363 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4364 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4365 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4367 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4368 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4370 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4371 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4372 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4374 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4376 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4377 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4379 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4380 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4382 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4384 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4385 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4387 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4388 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4390 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4391 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4392 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4394 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4396 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4398 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4402 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4404 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4405 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4406 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4408 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4409 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4411 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4412 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4413 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4415 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4416 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4418 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4419 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4420 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4421 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4423 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4424 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4426 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4427 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4428 the file system does not support it.
4430 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4432 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4433 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4435 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4437 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4438 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4440 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4441 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4442 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4443 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4445 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4446 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4449 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4450 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4451 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4452 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4454 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4455 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4456 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4457 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4459 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4460 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4462 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4464 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4465 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4466 reporting incorrect results.
4470 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4471 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4473 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4476 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4478 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4479 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4481 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4482 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4484 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4487 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4488 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4489 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4490 the file name does not look like a page range.
4492 printf has several changes:
4494 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4495 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4497 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4498 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4499 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4501 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4502 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4505 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4506 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4508 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4509 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4511 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4513 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4514 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4516 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4518 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4520 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4521 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4522 when first encountering the directory.
4526 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4527 output; POSIX requires this.
4529 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4530 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4532 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4534 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4535 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4537 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4538 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4540 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4541 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4542 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4543 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4544 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4545 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4546 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4548 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4549 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4550 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4552 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4553 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4555 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4557 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4559 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4560 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4561 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4562 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4564 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4568 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4569 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4570 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4571 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4572 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4574 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4575 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4576 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4578 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4579 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4581 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4582 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4584 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4585 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4586 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4587 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4588 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4590 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4591 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4593 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4594 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4596 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4598 nocreat do not create the output file
4599 excl fail if the output file already exists
4600 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4601 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4603 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4605 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4606 direct use direct I/O for data
4607 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4608 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4609 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4610 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4611 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4613 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4615 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4616 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4619 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4620 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4621 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4622 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4623 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4624 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4626 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4627 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4629 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4632 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4634 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4636 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4637 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4639 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4640 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4641 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4643 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4644 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4645 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4647 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4649 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4650 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4652 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4653 for compatibility with bash.
4655 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4657 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4658 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4659 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4660 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4662 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4663 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4665 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4666 ls supports TABSIZE.
4667 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4668 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4669 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4671 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4674 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4676 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4677 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4678 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4679 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4680 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4681 an offset, not as a file name.
4683 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4684 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4686 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4687 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4689 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4690 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4692 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4693 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4694 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4696 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4697 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4699 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4700 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4704 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4706 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4708 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4712 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4713 or more arguments between partitions.
4715 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4716 holes in the destination.
4718 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4719 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4720 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4721 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4722 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4723 terminates immediately.
4725 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4727 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4729 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4730 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4731 not the empty string.
4733 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4734 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4738 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4739 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4740 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4743 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4750 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4754 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4755 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4757 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4758 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4760 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4761 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4762 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4765 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4769 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4770 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4772 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4773 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4775 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4776 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4777 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4779 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4781 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4784 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4786 ** Configuration option
4788 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4789 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4793 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4794 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4798 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4799 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4800 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4803 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4804 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4805 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4806 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4807 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4808 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4809 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4812 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4816 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4817 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4818 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4820 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4821 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4823 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4825 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4826 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4827 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4828 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4830 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4832 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4833 not just the ones that reference directories
4835 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4836 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4838 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4839 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4840 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4842 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4843 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4844 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4845 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4846 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4847 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4849 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4854 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4855 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4857 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4859 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4861 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4863 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4864 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4866 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4867 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4869 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4871 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4875 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4877 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4879 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4880 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4881 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4882 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4883 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4885 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4886 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4888 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4889 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4891 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4892 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4894 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4895 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4896 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4900 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4901 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4902 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4903 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4904 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4905 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4906 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4907 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4908 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4909 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4910 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4911 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4912 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4913 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4915 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4917 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4918 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4920 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4922 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4924 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4925 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4927 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4929 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4930 without a trailing newline.
4932 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4933 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4935 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4938 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4942 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4944 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4946 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4947 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4948 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4949 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4951 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4953 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4954 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4955 be printed without leading spaces.
4957 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4958 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4963 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4964 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4965 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4967 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4969 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4970 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4972 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4973 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4975 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4976 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4978 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4980 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4982 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4984 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4985 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4987 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4989 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4991 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4992 byte offsets are specified.
4995 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4998 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5001 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5002 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5003 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5004 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5005 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5006 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5007 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5008 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5009 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5010 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5011 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5012 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5013 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5014 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5015 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5016 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5017 directory where M has write access.
5018 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5019 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5020 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5023 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5024 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5025 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5026 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5027 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5028 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5029 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5030 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5031 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5032 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5033 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5034 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5035 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5036 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5037 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5038 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5039 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5040 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5041 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5042 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5043 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5044 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5045 appeared one additional time.
5047 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5048 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5049 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5050 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5053 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5054 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5055 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5056 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5057 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5058 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5059 if there were more than 338.
5061 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5062 - false --help now exits nonzero
5065 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5066 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5067 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5068 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5071 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5072 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5073 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5074 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5075 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5078 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5079 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5080 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5081 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5082 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5083 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5084 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5087 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5088 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5089 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5090 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5091 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5092 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5094 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5095 under certain unusual conditions
5096 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5097 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5100 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5101 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5102 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5103 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5104 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5105 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5106 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5107 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5108 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5109 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5110 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5111 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5112 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5113 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5114 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5115 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5118 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5119 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5122 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5123 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5124 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5125 involving hard-linked directories
5126 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5127 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5128 character-special and block files
5131 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5132 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5133 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5134 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5135 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5136 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5137 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5138 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5139 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5141 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5142 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5143 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5144 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5145 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5146 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5147 specified on the command line.
5148 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5149 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5150 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5151 the first file untouched.
5152 * readlink: new program
5153 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5154 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5155 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5156 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5157 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5158 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5161 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5162 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5163 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5164 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5165 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5166 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5167 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5168 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5169 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5170 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5171 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5172 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5174 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5175 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5176 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5178 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5179 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5180 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5181 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5182 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5183 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5184 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5185 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5188 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5189 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5192 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5193 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5194 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5195 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5196 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5197 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5198 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5201 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5202 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5204 ========================================================================
5205 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5206 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5209 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5211 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5212 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5213 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5214 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5215 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5216 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5217 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5218 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5219 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5220 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5221 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5222 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5224 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5225 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5226 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5227 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5229 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5232 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5234 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5235 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5236 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5237 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5238 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5239 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5240 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5243 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5244 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5245 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5246 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5247 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5248 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5249 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5250 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5251 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5252 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5253 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5254 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5255 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5256 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5257 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5258 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5260 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5261 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5263 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5264 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5265 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5266 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5267 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5268 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5270 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5271 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5272 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5273 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5274 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5275 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5276 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5278 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5279 the source files in the following example:
5280 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5281 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5282 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5283 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5284 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5285 links between source files with --preserve=links
5286 * cp accepts new options:
5287 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5288 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5289 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5290 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5291 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5292 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5293 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5294 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5295 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5297 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5298 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5299 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5300 even though it's older than dest.
5301 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5302 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5303 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5304 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5305 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5307 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5308 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5309 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5310 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5311 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5312 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5313 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5315 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5316 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5317 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5319 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5320 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5321 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5322 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5323 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5324 This is the default.
5326 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5327 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5328 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5329 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5330 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5332 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5335 ========================================================================
5336 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5337 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5340 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5341 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5343 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5344 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5345 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5346 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5347 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5349 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5350 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5351 that specifies a non-directory
5354 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5355 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5356 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5357 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5358 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5359 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5360 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5361 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5362 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5363 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5364 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5365 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5366 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5367 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5368 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5369 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5370 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5371 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5372 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5373 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5374 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5375 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5376 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5377 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5379 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5380 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5381 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5383 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5385 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5386 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5388 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5389 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5390 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5391 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5392 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5394 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5395 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5396 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5397 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5398 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5400 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5402 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5403 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5404 * still more portability fixes
5405 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5406 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5408 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5410 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5412 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5414 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5415 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5416 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5417 there is any time remaining
5418 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5420 ========================================================================
5421 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5422 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5424 This package began as the union of the following:
5425 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5427 ========================================================================
5429 Copyright (C) 2001-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5431 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5432 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5433 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5434 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5435 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5436 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.