1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
8 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
10 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
12 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
13 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
14 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
16 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
17 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
18 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
21 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
22 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
23 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
25 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
26 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
28 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
32 id -Z reports the SMACK security context where available.
34 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
35 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
36 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
38 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
39 unique groups with empty lines.
41 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
42 used to identify the split points.
46 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
47 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
48 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
49 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
51 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
52 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
53 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
55 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
56 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
60 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
63 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
67 numfmt: reformat numbers
71 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
72 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
73 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
75 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
76 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
77 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
81 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
82 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
84 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
85 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
86 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
88 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
89 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
90 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
92 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
93 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
94 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
96 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
97 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
98 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
100 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
101 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
102 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
104 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
107 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
108 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
110 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
111 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
112 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
114 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
115 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
116 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
118 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
119 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
120 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
122 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
123 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
124 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
125 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
127 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
128 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
129 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
131 ** Changes in behavior
133 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
134 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
135 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
136 'total' in the target column.
138 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
139 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
140 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
142 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
143 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
147 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
148 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
150 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
151 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
153 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
157 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
158 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
159 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
160 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
161 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
162 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
163 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
164 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
165 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
166 for a patched distribution package.
168 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
169 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
171 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
172 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
173 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
174 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
181 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
183 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
184 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
185 sha384sum and sha512sum.
189 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
190 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
191 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
192 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
195 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
196 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
198 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
199 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
200 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
201 eventually exits nonzero.
203 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
204 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
205 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
206 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
209 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
210 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
213 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
214 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
217 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
218 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
221 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
222 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
223 Before, this would infloop:
224 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
225 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
227 ** Changes in behavior
229 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
233 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
234 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
235 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
236 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
237 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
240 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
241 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
242 format-changing options.
244 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
245 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
246 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
247 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
248 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
252 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
253 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
254 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
255 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
256 are run without following the instructions in README.
258 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
259 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
260 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
261 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
262 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
263 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
264 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
267 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
271 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
272 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
273 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
274 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
276 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
277 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
278 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
281 sort -u could read freed memory.
282 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
283 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
284 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
288 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
289 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
290 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
291 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
294 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
298 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
299 processes will not intersperse their output.
300 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
302 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
303 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
304 date: invalid date '\260'
305 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
307 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
308 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
309 lines output by df, can work reliably.
310 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
312 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
313 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
314 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
316 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
317 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
318 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
319 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
320 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
321 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
323 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
326 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
327 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
329 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
330 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
331 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
333 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
334 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
335 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
339 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
341 ** Changes in behavior
343 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
344 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
345 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
346 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
347 have any reason to include it here.
351 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
352 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
353 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
355 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
356 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
357 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
360 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
364 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
365 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
366 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
367 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
368 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
369 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
371 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
372 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
373 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
374 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
375 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
376 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
377 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
379 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
382 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
383 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
387 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
388 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
390 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
392 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
394 ** Changes in behavior
396 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
397 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
398 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
400 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
401 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
404 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
408 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
409 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
410 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
411 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
412 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
413 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
414 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
415 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
417 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
418 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
419 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
420 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
421 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
423 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
424 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
426 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
427 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
429 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
430 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
432 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
433 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
435 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
436 additional static suffix to output file names.
438 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
439 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
440 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
442 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
443 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
447 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
448 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
451 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
452 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
453 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
454 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
455 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
456 typically still point to one of the hard links.
458 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
459 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
460 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
461 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
462 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
464 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
465 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
466 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
467 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
471 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
472 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
473 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
475 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
476 instead of causing a usage failure.
478 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
481 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
485 realpath: print resolved file names.
489 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
492 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
495 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
496 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
497 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
498 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
499 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
502 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
503 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
504 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
506 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
507 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
510 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
511 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
512 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
513 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
516 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
518 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
521 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
522 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
523 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
525 ** Changes in behavior
527 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
528 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
529 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
530 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
531 usually-short referent instead.
533 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
534 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
535 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
536 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
539 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
543 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
544 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
545 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
547 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
550 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
555 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
556 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
558 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
559 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
560 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
561 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
563 ** Changes in behavior
565 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
566 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
567 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
571 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
572 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
573 only .tar.xz files is enough.
576 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
580 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
581 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
582 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
584 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
585 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
587 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
588 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
589 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
590 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
591 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
593 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
594 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
595 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
596 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
597 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
598 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
599 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
600 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
602 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
603 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
605 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
606 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
608 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
609 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
611 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
612 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
613 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
615 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
616 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
617 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
620 ** Changes in behavior
622 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
623 when -v or -c specified.
625 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
626 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
630 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
631 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
632 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
633 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
634 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
636 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
637 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
638 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
640 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
641 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
642 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
643 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
644 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
645 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
646 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
648 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
649 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
650 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
654 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
655 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
657 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
660 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
661 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
663 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
664 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
666 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
667 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
669 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
671 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
675 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
676 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
678 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
681 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
685 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
686 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
688 ** Changes in behavior
690 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
691 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
692 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
693 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
694 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
695 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
697 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
698 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
699 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
703 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
706 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
710 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
711 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
714 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
715 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
718 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
719 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
720 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
722 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
723 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
725 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
728 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
731 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
732 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
736 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
737 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
738 processed portion thereof.
740 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
741 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
743 ** Changes in behavior
745 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
746 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
747 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
749 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
750 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
751 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
753 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
754 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
756 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
757 Use --preserve-context instead.
759 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
762 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
766 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
767 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
768 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
769 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
770 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
772 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
773 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
775 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
776 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
777 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
779 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
780 reject file names invalid for that file system.
782 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
783 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
787 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
788 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
789 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
790 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
791 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
792 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
793 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
794 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
796 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
797 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
798 the same number of fields are output for each line.
800 ** Changes in behavior
802 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
803 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
804 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
807 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
811 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
812 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
816 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
820 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
821 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
823 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
824 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
826 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
827 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
829 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
830 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
831 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
832 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
834 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
835 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
837 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
838 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
839 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
841 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
843 ** Changes in behavior
845 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
846 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
847 to the number of available processors.
851 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
854 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
858 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
859 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
860 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
861 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
863 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
864 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
865 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
867 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
868 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
870 ** Changes in behavior
872 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
873 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
875 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
876 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
877 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
878 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
879 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
880 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
882 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
883 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
884 the same way as the others.
887 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
891 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
892 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
893 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
895 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
896 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
898 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
899 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
900 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
902 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
903 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
905 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
906 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
908 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
909 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
910 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
912 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
913 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
914 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
915 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
919 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
920 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
922 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
925 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
926 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
928 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
930 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
931 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
932 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
934 ** Changes in behavior
936 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
937 rather than its aliased target.
939 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
940 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
941 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
943 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
944 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
945 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
946 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
947 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
948 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
949 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
950 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
952 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
954 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
956 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
957 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
960 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
961 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
962 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
963 control like taskset for example.
965 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
967 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
968 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
969 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
970 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
971 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
972 includes %C when context information is available.
974 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
975 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
976 rather than a file system attribute.
978 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
979 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
980 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
981 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
983 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
984 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
985 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
987 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
988 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
989 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
992 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
996 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
997 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
999 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1001 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1002 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1004 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1005 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1006 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1007 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1009 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1010 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1015 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1016 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1018 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1019 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1020 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1022 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1023 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1024 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1025 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1026 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1027 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1028 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1029 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1030 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1032 ** Changes in behavior
1034 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1035 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1037 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1038 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1041 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1045 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1046 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1047 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1052 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1053 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1055 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1056 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1057 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1058 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1060 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1061 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1062 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1065 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1069 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1070 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1071 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1073 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1074 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1075 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1077 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1078 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1080 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1081 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1082 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1085 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1086 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1089 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1090 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1091 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1094 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1095 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1098 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1099 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1100 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1103 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1104 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1107 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1108 processes will not intersperse their output.
1109 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1116 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1119 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1122 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1123 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1124 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1125 the presence of the empty string argument.
1126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1128 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1129 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1130 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1131 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1133 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1136 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1137 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1138 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1140 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1141 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1142 and with a malicious user on the same system
1143 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1144 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1147 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1151 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1152 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1155 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1156 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1157 offending directory and all "contents."
1159 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1160 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1161 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1163 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1164 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1165 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1167 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1168 processes will not intersperse their output.
1169 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1170 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1172 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1173 output the name of the file to stdout.
1174 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1176 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1177 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1178 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1180 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1181 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1184 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1185 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1186 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1188 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1189 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1190 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1191 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1192 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1193 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1195 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1196 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1197 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1198 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1200 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1201 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1203 ** Changes in behavior
1205 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1206 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1207 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1208 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1209 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1211 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1212 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1213 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1214 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1216 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1218 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1219 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1220 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1221 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1222 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1226 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1230 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1231 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1233 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1234 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1236 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1237 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1238 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1240 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1241 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1244 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1248 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1249 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1250 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1252 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1253 to accommodate leap seconds.
1254 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1256 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1257 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1258 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1260 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1262 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1263 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1264 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1266 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1267 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1268 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1269 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1270 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1274 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1275 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1276 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1277 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1279 ** Changes in behavior
1281 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1282 environment variable is set.
1284 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1285 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1286 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1290 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1291 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1292 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1293 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1295 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1296 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1297 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1298 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1302 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1303 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1304 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1306 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1307 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1308 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1309 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1310 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1311 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1312 another improvement:
1314 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1315 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1318 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1322 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1323 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1324 and libraries tested at configure time.
1325 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1327 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1328 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1330 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1333 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1334 printing a summary to stderr.
1335 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1337 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1338 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1339 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1341 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1344 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1345 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1346 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1347 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1349 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1350 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1351 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1352 which is relatively unusual.
1353 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1355 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1356 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1357 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1358 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1359 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1360 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1365 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1366 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1367 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1368 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1369 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1373 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1374 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1376 ** Changes in behavior
1378 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1379 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1380 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1381 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1382 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1385 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1389 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1390 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1392 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1393 before data copying has started.
1395 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1396 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1398 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1399 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1400 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1401 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1403 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1404 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1405 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1406 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1408 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1413 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1414 for its standard streams.
1416 ** Changes in behavior
1418 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1419 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1420 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1421 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1422 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1423 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1425 ** Deprecated options
1427 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1428 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1432 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1434 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1435 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1436 a btrfs file system.
1438 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1440 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1441 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1443 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1444 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1447 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1451 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1452 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1453 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1454 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1456 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1457 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1458 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1459 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1460 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1465 make check: two tests have been corrected
1469 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1470 inherited from gnulib.
1473 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1477 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1478 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1479 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1480 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1482 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1483 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1485 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1487 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1488 systems without xattr support.
1490 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1491 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1492 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1494 ** Changes in behavior
1496 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1497 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1498 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1499 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1501 ** Improved robustness
1503 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1504 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1505 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1506 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1507 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1508 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1509 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1510 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1511 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1515 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1516 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1518 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1519 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1520 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1521 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1522 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1525 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1529 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1530 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1531 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1535 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1536 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1537 data was read, or on process exit.
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1540 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1541 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1542 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1545 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1546 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1547 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1548 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1550 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1551 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1553 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1554 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1556 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1557 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1558 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1560 ** Changes in behavior
1562 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1563 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1564 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1566 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1567 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1569 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1570 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1571 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1574 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1578 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1580 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1581 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1582 install: Never copies xattrs
1584 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1585 from overwriting any existing destination file
1587 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1588 mode where this feature is available.
1590 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1591 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1592 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1593 do not modify the destination at all.
1595 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1597 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1601 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1602 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1604 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1606 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1607 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1609 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1610 processing the first file name
1612 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1613 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1614 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1615 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1617 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1618 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1620 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1621 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1624 ** Changes in behavior
1626 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1627 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1629 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1630 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1631 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1633 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1634 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1636 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1638 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1639 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1640 is still marked with a '+'.
1643 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1647 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1648 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1652 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1653 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1654 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1655 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1656 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1657 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1659 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1660 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1662 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1663 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1665 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1667 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1668 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1669 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1671 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1672 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1674 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1675 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1676 used to factor large numbers.
1678 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1681 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1683 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1685 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1686 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1688 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1689 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1690 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1691 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1693 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1694 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1695 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1697 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1698 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1702 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1704 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1705 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1707 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1708 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1710 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1712 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1713 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1717 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1718 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1719 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1721 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1723 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1724 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1725 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1727 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1728 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1729 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1731 ** Changes in behavior
1733 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1734 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1737 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1741 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1742 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1743 'futimens' system calls.
1747 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1749 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1750 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1751 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1753 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1754 with no USERNAME argument.
1756 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1757 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1758 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1760 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1761 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1762 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1763 number of fields for some inputs.
1765 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1766 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1768 ** Changes in behavior
1770 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1771 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1774 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1778 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1780 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1781 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1782 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1783 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1785 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1786 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1788 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1789 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1791 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1792 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1794 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1795 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1796 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1797 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1799 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1800 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1801 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1802 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1803 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1804 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1806 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1807 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1809 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1810 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1811 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1813 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1814 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1816 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1817 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1819 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1820 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1821 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1822 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1824 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1825 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1827 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1828 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1830 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1831 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1832 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1836 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1837 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1839 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1840 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1841 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1842 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1846 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1847 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1849 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1851 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1855 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1856 which have negative errno values.
1860 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1864 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1868 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1872 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1876 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1877 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1878 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1880 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1881 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1882 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1883 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1887 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1888 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1889 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1890 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1893 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1897 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1899 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1900 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1901 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1904 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1908 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1909 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1911 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1913 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1915 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1917 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1921 ** Changes in behavior
1923 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1924 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1926 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1927 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1929 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1930 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1931 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1935 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1936 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1937 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1938 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1939 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1940 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1941 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1942 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1943 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1944 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1945 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1947 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1948 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1949 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1952 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1955 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1956 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1957 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1959 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1960 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1961 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1964 ** New build options
1966 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1967 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1968 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1969 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1971 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1972 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1973 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1974 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1975 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1976 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1977 of "make check" fail.
1979 ** Remove deprecated options
1981 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1982 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1983 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1984 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1985 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1987 ** Improved robustness
1989 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1990 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1991 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1992 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1993 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1994 loss of the contents of a/f.
1996 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1997 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2001 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2002 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2003 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2005 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2006 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2007 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2008 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2010 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2011 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2012 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2013 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2014 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2015 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2016 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2017 destination is a symlink.
2019 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2021 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2022 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2024 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2025 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2027 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2029 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2030 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2032 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2033 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2035 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2038 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2039 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2041 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2042 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2044 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2045 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2046 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2047 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2049 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2050 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2051 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2053 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2054 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2055 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2057 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2058 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2059 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2060 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2062 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2063 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2064 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2066 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2067 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2069 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2070 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2072 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2074 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2075 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2076 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2078 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2079 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2081 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2082 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2084 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2085 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2087 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2088 [present in the original version]
2091 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2095 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2097 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2098 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2099 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2101 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2102 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2104 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2108 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2109 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2111 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2112 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2114 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2115 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2117 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2118 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2119 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2120 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2121 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2122 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2124 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2125 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2128 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2129 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2131 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2134 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2135 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2136 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2138 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2139 directory is unreadable.
2141 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2142 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2143 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2145 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2146 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2147 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2148 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2149 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2152 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2153 Before it would print nothing.
2155 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2157 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2158 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2159 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2160 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2161 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2162 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2163 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2164 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2166 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2170 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2171 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2172 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2174 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2175 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2176 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2177 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2180 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2184 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2185 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2186 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2187 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2188 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2189 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2190 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2192 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2193 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2194 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2195 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2196 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2197 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2198 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2199 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2201 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2202 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2203 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2206 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2210 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2211 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2213 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2214 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2215 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2217 ** Improved robustness
2219 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2220 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2221 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2224 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2228 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2229 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2230 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2231 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2232 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2234 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2238 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2241 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2245 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2246 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2247 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2248 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2250 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2251 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2253 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2254 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2255 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2258 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2260 ** Improved robustness
2262 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2263 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2265 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2266 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2267 or NFS-mounted partition.
2269 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2270 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2274 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2275 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2276 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2277 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2278 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2279 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2281 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2282 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2284 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2285 or neglect to report file removal.
2287 For the "groups" command:
2289 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2290 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2292 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2294 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2296 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2300 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2301 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2304 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2306 ** Changes in behavior
2308 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2309 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2310 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2311 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2313 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2314 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2315 a final './' or '../' component.
2317 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2318 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2319 this only for pipes.
2321 ** Infrastructure changes
2323 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2324 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2325 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2326 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2330 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2331 name is "." or "..".
2333 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2334 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2335 dirent.d_type support.
2337 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2338 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2340 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2341 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2342 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2343 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2346 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2348 ** Changes in behavior
2350 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2354 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2355 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2359 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2360 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2361 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2363 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2364 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2366 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2367 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2369 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2371 ** Improved robustness
2373 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2374 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2375 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2377 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2378 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2381 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2382 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2384 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2385 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2387 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2388 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2390 ** Changes in behavior
2392 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2393 where the two are distinct.
2395 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2396 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2397 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2398 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2399 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2400 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2401 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2402 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2403 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2404 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2405 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2406 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2407 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2408 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2409 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2410 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2411 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2413 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2414 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2415 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2417 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2418 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2419 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2420 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2423 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2424 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2428 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2429 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2430 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2431 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2433 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2434 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2435 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2437 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2438 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2439 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2440 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2441 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2444 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2445 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2447 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2448 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2449 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2450 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2452 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2453 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2454 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2456 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2457 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2458 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2459 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2461 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2462 and sticky) with the -m option.
2464 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2465 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2466 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2467 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2468 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2470 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2471 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2473 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2477 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2478 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2479 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2480 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2482 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2484 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2486 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2487 silently ignoring one of them.
2489 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2490 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2491 containing this change was 5.92.
2493 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2494 automatically newline terminated.
2496 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2497 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2498 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2499 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2502 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2503 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2504 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2507 ** Scheduled for removal
2509 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2510 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2512 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2513 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2514 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2515 command to unlink a directory.
2517 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2518 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2519 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2520 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2524 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2525 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2526 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2527 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2528 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2529 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2533 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2534 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2536 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2538 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2539 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2540 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2542 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2543 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2546 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2547 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2549 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2550 list directories before files.
2552 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2553 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2554 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2555 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2558 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2560 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2562 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2563 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2564 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2566 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2567 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2571 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2572 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2573 usually printing nothing.
2575 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2577 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2578 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2579 them with hard-linked directories.
2581 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2582 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2583 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2585 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2586 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2587 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2589 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2592 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2593 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2595 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2596 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2598 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2599 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2601 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2602 all command-line arguments.
2604 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2606 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2608 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2609 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2611 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2613 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2614 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2615 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2616 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2617 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2619 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2620 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2622 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2623 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2624 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2625 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2627 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2629 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2633 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2634 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2636 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2637 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2639 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2640 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2642 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2643 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2645 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2646 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2648 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2650 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2651 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2652 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2655 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2657 ** Build-related bug fixes
2659 installing .mo files would fail
2662 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2666 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2668 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2671 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2675 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2676 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2680 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2682 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2683 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2685 ** Deprecated options
2687 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2688 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2690 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2694 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2696 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2697 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2698 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2699 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2701 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2704 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2710 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2715 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2717 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2719 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2720 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2721 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2723 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2724 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2725 problematic usages. These include:
2727 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2728 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2729 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2730 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2731 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2732 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2733 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2734 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2735 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2737 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2738 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2740 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2741 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2742 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2743 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2745 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2746 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2747 between binary and text files.
2749 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2753 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2757 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2758 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2760 head tac tail tee tr
2761 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2763 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2764 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2766 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2767 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2768 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2770 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2772 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2774 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2775 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2776 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2780 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2782 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2783 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2785 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2786 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2787 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2791 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2792 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2796 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2797 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2798 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2802 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2803 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2807 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2809 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2811 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2815 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2816 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2817 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2819 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2820 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2821 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2822 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2823 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2825 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2829 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2830 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2831 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2833 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2835 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2836 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2837 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2838 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2840 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2842 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2843 rather than silently wrapping around.
2845 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2846 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2848 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2849 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2851 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2852 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2853 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2854 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2856 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2858 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2860 ** Improved robustness
2862 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2863 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2864 no matter how large the result.
2866 ** Improved portability
2868 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2869 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2871 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2873 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2874 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2875 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2877 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2878 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2882 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2883 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2885 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2887 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2888 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2889 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2890 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2892 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2893 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2895 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2896 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2897 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2899 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2901 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2902 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2904 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2905 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2907 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2909 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2910 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2912 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2913 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2915 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2916 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2917 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2919 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2921 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2923 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2927 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2929 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2930 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2931 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2933 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2934 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2936 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2937 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2938 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2940 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2941 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2943 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2944 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2945 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2946 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2948 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2949 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2951 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2952 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2953 the file system does not support it.
2955 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2957 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2958 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2960 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2962 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2963 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2965 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2966 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2967 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2968 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2970 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2971 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2974 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2975 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2976 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2977 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2979 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2980 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2981 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2982 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2984 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2985 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2987 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2989 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2990 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2991 reporting incorrect results.
2995 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2996 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2998 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3001 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3003 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3004 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3006 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3007 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3009 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3012 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3013 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3014 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3015 the file name does not look like a page range.
3017 printf has several changes:
3019 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3020 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3022 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3023 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3024 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3026 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3027 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3030 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3031 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3033 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3034 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3036 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3038 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3039 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3041 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3043 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3045 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3046 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3047 when first encountering the directory.
3051 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3052 output; POSIX requires this.
3054 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3055 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3057 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3059 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3060 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3062 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3063 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3065 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3066 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3067 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3068 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3069 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3070 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3071 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3073 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3074 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3075 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3077 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3078 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3080 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3082 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3084 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3085 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3086 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3087 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3089 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3093 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3094 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3095 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3096 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3097 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3099 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3100 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3101 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3103 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3104 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3106 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3107 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3109 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3110 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3111 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3112 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3113 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3115 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3116 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3118 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3119 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3121 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3123 nocreat do not create the output file
3124 excl fail if the output file already exists
3125 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3126 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3128 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3130 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3131 direct use direct I/O for data
3132 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3133 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3134 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3135 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3136 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3138 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3140 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3141 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3144 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3145 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3146 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3147 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3148 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3149 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3151 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3152 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3154 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3157 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3159 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3161 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3162 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3164 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3165 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3166 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3168 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3169 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3170 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3172 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3174 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3175 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3177 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3178 for compatibility with bash.
3180 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3182 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3183 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3184 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3185 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3187 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3188 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3190 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3191 ls supports TABSIZE.
3192 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3193 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3194 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3196 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3199 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3201 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3202 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3203 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3204 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3205 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3206 an offset, not as a file name.
3208 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3209 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3211 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3212 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3214 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3215 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3217 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3218 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3219 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3221 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3222 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3224 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3225 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3229 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3231 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3233 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3237 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3238 or more arguments between partitions.
3240 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3241 holes in the destination.
3243 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3244 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3245 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3246 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3247 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3248 terminates immediately.
3250 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3252 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3254 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3255 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3256 not the empty string.
3258 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3259 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3263 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3264 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3265 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3268 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3275 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3279 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3280 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3282 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3283 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3285 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3286 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3287 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3290 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3294 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3295 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3297 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3298 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3300 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3301 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3302 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3304 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3306 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3309 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3311 ** Configuration option
3313 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3314 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3318 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3319 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3323 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3324 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3325 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3328 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3329 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3330 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3331 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3332 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3333 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3334 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3337 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3341 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3342 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3343 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3345 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3346 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3348 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3350 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3351 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3352 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3353 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3355 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3357 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3358 not just the ones that reference directories
3360 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3361 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3363 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3364 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3365 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3367 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3368 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3369 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3370 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3371 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3372 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3374 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3379 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3380 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3382 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3384 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3386 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3388 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3389 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3391 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3392 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3394 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3396 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3400 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3402 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3404 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3405 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3406 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3407 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3408 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3410 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3411 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3413 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3414 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3416 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3417 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3419 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3420 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3421 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3425 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3426 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3427 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3428 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3429 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3430 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3431 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3432 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3433 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3434 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3435 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3436 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3437 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3438 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3440 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3442 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3443 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3445 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3447 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3449 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3450 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3452 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3454 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3455 without a trailing newline.
3457 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3458 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3460 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3463 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3467 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3469 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3471 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3472 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3473 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3474 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3476 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3478 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3479 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3480 be printed without leading spaces.
3482 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3483 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3488 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3489 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3490 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3492 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3494 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3495 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3497 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3498 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3500 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3501 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3503 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3505 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3507 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3509 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3510 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3512 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3514 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3516 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3517 byte offsets are specified.
3520 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3523 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3526 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3527 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3528 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3529 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3530 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3531 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3532 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3533 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3534 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3535 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3536 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3537 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3538 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3539 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3540 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3541 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3542 directory where M has write access.
3543 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3544 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3545 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3548 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3549 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3550 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3551 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3552 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3553 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3554 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3555 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3556 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3557 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3558 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3559 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3560 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3561 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3562 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3563 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3564 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3565 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3566 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3567 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3568 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3569 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3570 appeared one additional time.
3572 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3573 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3574 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3575 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3578 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3579 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3580 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3581 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3582 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3583 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3584 if there were more than 338.
3586 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3587 - false --help now exits nonzero
3590 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3591 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3592 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3593 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3596 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3597 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3598 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3599 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3600 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3603 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3604 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3605 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3606 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3607 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3608 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3609 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3612 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3613 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3614 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3615 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3616 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3617 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3619 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3620 under certain unusual conditions
3621 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3622 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3625 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3626 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3627 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3628 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3629 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3630 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3631 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3632 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3633 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3634 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3635 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3636 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3637 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3638 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3639 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3640 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3643 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3644 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3647 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3648 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3649 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3650 involving hard-linked directories
3651 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3652 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3653 character-special and block files
3656 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3657 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3658 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3659 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3660 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3661 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3662 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3663 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3664 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3666 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3667 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3668 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3669 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3670 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3671 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3672 specified on the command line.
3673 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3674 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3675 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3676 the first file untouched.
3677 * readlink: new program
3678 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3679 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3680 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3681 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3682 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3683 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3686 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3687 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3688 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3689 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3690 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3691 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3692 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3693 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3694 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3695 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3696 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3697 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3699 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3700 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3701 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3703 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3704 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3705 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3706 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3707 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3708 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3709 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3710 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3713 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3714 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3717 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3718 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3719 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3720 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3721 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3722 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3723 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3726 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3727 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3729 ========================================================================
3730 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3731 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3734 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3736 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3737 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3738 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3739 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3740 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3741 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3742 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3743 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3744 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3745 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3746 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3747 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3749 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3750 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3751 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3752 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3754 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3757 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3759 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3760 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3761 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3762 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3763 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3764 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3765 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3768 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3769 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3770 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3771 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3772 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3773 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3774 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3775 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3776 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3777 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3778 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3779 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3780 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3781 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3782 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3783 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3785 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3786 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3788 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3789 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3790 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3791 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3792 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3793 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3795 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3796 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3797 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3798 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3799 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3800 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3801 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3803 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3804 the source files in the following example:
3805 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3806 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3807 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3808 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3809 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3810 links between source files with --preserve=links
3811 * cp accepts new options:
3812 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3813 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3814 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3815 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3816 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3817 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3818 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3819 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3820 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3822 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3823 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3824 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3825 even though it's older than dest.
3826 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3827 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3828 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3829 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3830 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3832 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3833 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3834 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3835 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3836 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3837 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3838 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3840 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3841 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3842 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3844 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3845 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3846 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3847 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3848 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3849 This is the default.
3851 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3852 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3853 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3854 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3855 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3857 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3860 ========================================================================
3861 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3862 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3865 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3866 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3868 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3869 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3870 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3871 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3872 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3874 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3875 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3876 that specifies a non-directory
3879 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3880 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3881 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3882 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3883 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3884 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3885 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3886 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3887 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3888 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3889 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3890 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3891 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3892 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3893 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3894 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3895 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3896 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3897 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3898 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3899 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3900 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3901 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3902 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3904 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3905 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3906 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3908 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3910 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3911 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3913 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3914 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3915 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3916 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3917 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3919 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3920 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3921 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3922 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3923 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3925 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3927 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3928 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3929 * still more portability fixes
3930 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3931 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3933 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3935 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3937 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3939 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3940 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3941 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3942 there is any time remaining
3943 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3945 ========================================================================
3946 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3947 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3949 This package began as the union of the following:
3950 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3952 ========================================================================
3954 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3956 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3957 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3958 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3959 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3960 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3961 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.