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".]
14 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
15 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
16 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
18 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
19 unique groups with empty lines.
23 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
26 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
30 numfmt: reformat numbers
34 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
35 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
36 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
38 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
39 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
40 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
44 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
47 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
48 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
51 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
52 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
53 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
55 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
56 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
57 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
59 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
60 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
61 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
63 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
64 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
65 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
67 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
70 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
71 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
73 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
74 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
75 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
77 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
78 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
79 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
81 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
82 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
83 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
85 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
86 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
87 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
88 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
90 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
91 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
92 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
94 ** Changes in behavior
96 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
97 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
98 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
99 'total' in the target column.
101 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
102 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
103 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
105 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
106 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
110 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
111 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
113 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
114 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
116 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
120 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
121 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
122 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
123 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
124 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
125 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
126 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
127 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
128 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
129 for a patched distribution package.
131 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
132 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
134 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
135 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
136 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
137 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
140 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
144 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
146 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
147 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
148 sha384sum and sha512sum.
152 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
153 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
154 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
155 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
158 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
159 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
161 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
162 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
163 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
164 eventually exits nonzero.
166 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
167 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
168 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
169 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
172 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
173 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
176 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
177 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
180 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
181 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
184 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
185 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
186 Before, this would infloop:
187 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
188 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
190 ** Changes in behavior
192 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
196 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
197 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
198 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
199 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
200 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
203 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
204 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
205 format-changing options.
207 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
208 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
209 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
210 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
211 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
215 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
216 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
217 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
218 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
219 are run without following the instructions in README.
221 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
222 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
223 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
224 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
225 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
226 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
227 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
230 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
234 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
235 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
236 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
237 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
239 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
240 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
241 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
244 sort -u could read freed memory.
245 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
246 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
251 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
252 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
253 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
254 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
257 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
261 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
262 processes will not intersperse their output.
263 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
265 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
266 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
267 date: invalid date '\260'
268 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
270 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
271 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
272 lines output by df, can work reliably.
273 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
275 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
276 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
277 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
279 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
280 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
281 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
282 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
283 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
284 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
286 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
289 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
290 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
292 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
293 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
294 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
296 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
297 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
298 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
302 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
304 ** Changes in behavior
306 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
307 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
308 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
309 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
310 have any reason to include it here.
314 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
315 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
316 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
318 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
319 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
320 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
323 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
327 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
328 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
329 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
330 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
331 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
332 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
334 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
335 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
336 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
337 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
338 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
339 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
340 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
342 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
345 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
346 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
350 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
351 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
353 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
355 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
357 ** Changes in behavior
359 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
360 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
361 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
363 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
364 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
367 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
371 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
372 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
373 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
374 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
375 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
376 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
377 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
378 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
380 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
381 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
382 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
383 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
384 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
386 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
387 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
389 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
390 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
392 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
393 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
395 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
396 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
398 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
399 additional static suffix to output file names.
401 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
402 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
403 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
405 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
406 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
410 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
411 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
412 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
414 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
415 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
416 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
417 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
418 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
419 typically still point to one of the hard links.
421 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
422 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
423 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
424 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
425 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
427 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
428 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
429 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
430 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
434 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
435 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
436 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
438 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
439 instead of causing a usage failure.
441 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
444 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
448 realpath: print resolved file names.
452 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
455 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
458 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
459 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
460 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
461 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
462 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
465 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
466 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
467 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
469 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
470 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
473 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
474 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
475 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
476 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
477 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
479 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
481 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
484 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
485 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
486 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
488 ** Changes in behavior
490 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
491 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
492 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
493 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
494 usually-short referent instead.
496 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
497 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
498 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
499 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
502 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
506 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
507 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
508 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
510 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
513 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
518 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
519 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
521 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
522 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
523 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
524 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
526 ** Changes in behavior
528 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
529 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
530 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
534 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
535 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
536 only .tar.xz files is enough.
539 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
543 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
544 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
545 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
547 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
548 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
550 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
551 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
552 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
553 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
554 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
556 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
557 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
558 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
559 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
560 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
561 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
562 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
563 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
565 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
566 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
568 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
569 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
571 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
572 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
574 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
575 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
576 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
578 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
579 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
580 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
583 ** Changes in behavior
585 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
586 when -v or -c specified.
588 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
589 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
593 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
594 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
595 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
596 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
597 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
599 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
600 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
601 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
603 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
604 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
605 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
606 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
607 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
608 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
609 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
611 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
612 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
613 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
617 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
618 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
620 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
623 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
624 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
626 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
627 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
629 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
630 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
632 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
634 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
638 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
639 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
641 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
644 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
648 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
649 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
651 ** Changes in behavior
653 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
654 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
655 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
656 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
657 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
658 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
660 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
661 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
662 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
666 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
673 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
674 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
677 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
678 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
681 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
682 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
683 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
685 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
686 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
688 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
691 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
694 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
699 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
700 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
701 processed portion thereof.
703 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
704 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
706 ** Changes in behavior
708 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
709 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
710 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
712 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
713 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
714 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
716 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
717 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
719 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
720 Use --preserve-context instead.
722 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
725 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
729 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
730 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
731 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
732 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
735 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
736 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
738 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
739 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
740 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
742 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
743 reject file names invalid for that file system.
745 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
750 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
751 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
752 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
753 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
754 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
755 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
756 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
757 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
759 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
760 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
761 the same number of fields are output for each line.
763 ** Changes in behavior
765 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
766 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
767 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
770 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
774 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
775 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
776 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
779 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
783 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
784 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
786 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
787 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
789 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
790 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
792 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
793 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
794 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
795 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
797 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
798 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
800 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
801 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
802 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
804 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
806 ** Changes in behavior
808 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
809 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
810 to the number of available processors.
814 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
821 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
822 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
823 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
824 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
826 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
827 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
828 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
830 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
831 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
833 ** Changes in behavior
835 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
836 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
838 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
839 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
840 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
841 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
842 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
843 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
845 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
846 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
847 the same way as the others.
850 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
854 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
855 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
856 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
858 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
859 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
861 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
862 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
863 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
865 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
868 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
869 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
871 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
872 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
873 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
875 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
876 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
877 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
878 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
882 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
883 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
885 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
888 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
889 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
891 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
893 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
894 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
895 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
897 ** Changes in behavior
899 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
900 rather than its aliased target.
902 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
903 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
904 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
906 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
907 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
908 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
909 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
910 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
911 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
912 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
913 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
915 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
917 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
919 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
920 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
923 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
924 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
925 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
926 control like taskset for example.
928 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
930 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
931 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
932 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
933 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
934 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
935 includes %C when context information is available.
937 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
938 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
939 rather than a file system attribute.
941 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
942 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
943 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
944 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
946 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
947 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
948 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
950 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
951 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
952 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
955 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
959 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
960 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
962 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
964 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
967 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
968 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
969 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
970 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
972 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
973 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
978 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
979 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
981 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
982 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
983 duration after the initial signal was sent.
985 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
986 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
987 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
988 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
989 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
990 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
991 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
992 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
993 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
995 ** Changes in behavior
997 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
998 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1000 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1001 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1004 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1008 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1009 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1010 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1015 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1016 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1018 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1019 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1020 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1021 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1023 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1024 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1025 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1028 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1032 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1033 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1034 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1036 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1037 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1038 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1040 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1043 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1044 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1045 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1046 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1048 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1049 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1050 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1052 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1053 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1054 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1057 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1058 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1059 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1061 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1062 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1063 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1066 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1067 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1070 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1071 processes will not intersperse their output.
1072 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1075 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1079 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1080 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1082 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1085 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1086 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1087 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1088 the presence of the empty string argument.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1091 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1092 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1093 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1094 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1096 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1097 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1099 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1100 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1101 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1103 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1104 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1105 and with a malicious user on the same system
1106 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1114 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1115 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1118 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1119 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1120 offending directory and all "contents."
1122 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1123 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1124 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1126 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1127 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1128 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1130 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1131 processes will not intersperse their output.
1132 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1133 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1135 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1136 output the name of the file to stdout.
1137 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1139 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1140 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1141 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1143 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1144 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1147 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1148 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1149 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1151 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1152 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1153 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1154 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1155 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1156 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1158 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1159 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1160 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1161 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1163 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1164 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1166 ** Changes in behavior
1168 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1169 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1170 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1171 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1172 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1174 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1175 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1176 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1177 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1179 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1181 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1182 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1183 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1184 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1185 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1189 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1193 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1194 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1196 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1197 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1199 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1200 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1201 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1203 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1204 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1211 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1212 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1215 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1216 to accommodate leap seconds.
1217 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1219 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1220 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1221 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1223 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1225 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1226 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1227 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1229 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1230 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1231 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1232 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1233 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1237 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1238 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1239 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1240 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1242 ** Changes in behavior
1244 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1245 environment variable is set.
1247 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1248 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1249 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1253 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1254 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1255 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1256 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1258 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1259 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1260 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1261 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1265 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1266 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1267 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1269 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1270 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1271 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1272 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1273 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1274 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1275 another improvement:
1277 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1278 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1281 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1285 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1286 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1287 and libraries tested at configure time.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1290 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1293 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1294 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1296 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1297 printing a summary to stderr.
1298 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1300 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1301 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1302 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1304 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1305 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1307 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1308 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1309 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1310 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1312 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1313 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1314 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1315 which is relatively unusual.
1316 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1318 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1319 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1320 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1321 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1322 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1323 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1324 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1328 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1329 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1330 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1331 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1332 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1336 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1337 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1339 ** Changes in behavior
1341 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1342 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1343 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1344 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1345 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1348 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1352 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1353 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1355 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1356 before data copying has started.
1358 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1359 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1361 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1362 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1363 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1364 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1366 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1367 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1368 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1369 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1371 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1376 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1377 for its standard streams.
1379 ** Changes in behavior
1381 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1382 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1383 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1384 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1385 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1386 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1388 ** Deprecated options
1390 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1391 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1395 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1397 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1398 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1399 a btrfs file system.
1401 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1403 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1404 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1406 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1407 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1410 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1414 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1415 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1416 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1417 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1419 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1420 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1421 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1422 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1423 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1428 make check: two tests have been corrected
1432 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1433 inherited from gnulib.
1436 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1440 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1441 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1442 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1443 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1445 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1446 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1448 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1450 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1451 systems without xattr support.
1453 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1454 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1455 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1457 ** Changes in behavior
1459 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1460 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1461 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1462 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1464 ** Improved robustness
1466 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1467 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1468 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1469 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1470 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1471 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1472 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1473 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1474 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1478 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1479 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1481 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1482 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1483 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1484 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1485 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1488 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1492 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1493 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1494 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1498 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1499 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1500 data was read, or on process exit.
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1503 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1504 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1505 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1506 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1508 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1509 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1510 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1511 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1513 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1514 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1516 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1519 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1520 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1521 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1523 ** Changes in behavior
1525 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1526 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1527 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1529 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1530 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1532 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1533 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1534 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1537 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1541 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1543 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1544 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1545 install: Never copies xattrs
1547 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1548 from overwriting any existing destination file
1550 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1551 mode where this feature is available.
1553 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1554 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1555 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1556 do not modify the destination at all.
1558 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1560 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1564 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1565 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1567 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1569 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1570 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1572 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1573 processing the first file name
1575 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1576 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1577 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1578 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1580 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1581 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1583 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1584 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1587 ** Changes in behavior
1589 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1590 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1592 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1593 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1594 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1596 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1597 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1599 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1601 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1602 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1603 is still marked with a '+'.
1606 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1610 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1611 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1615 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1616 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1617 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1618 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1619 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1620 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1622 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1623 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1625 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1626 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1628 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1630 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1631 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1632 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1634 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1635 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1637 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1638 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1639 used to factor large numbers.
1641 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1644 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1646 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1648 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1649 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1651 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1652 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1653 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1654 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1656 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1657 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1658 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1660 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1661 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1665 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1667 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1668 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1670 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1671 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1673 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1675 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1676 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1680 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1681 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1682 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1684 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1686 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1687 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1688 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1690 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1691 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1692 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1694 ** Changes in behavior
1696 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1697 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1700 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1704 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1705 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1706 'futimens' system calls.
1710 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1712 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1713 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1714 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1716 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1717 with no USERNAME argument.
1719 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1720 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1721 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1723 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1724 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1725 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1726 number of fields for some inputs.
1728 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1729 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1731 ** Changes in behavior
1733 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1734 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1737 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1741 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1743 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1744 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1745 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1746 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1748 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1749 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1751 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1752 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1754 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1755 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1757 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1758 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1759 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1760 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1762 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1763 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1764 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1765 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1766 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1767 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1769 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1770 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1772 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1773 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1774 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1776 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1777 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1779 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1780 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1782 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1783 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1784 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1785 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1787 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1788 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1790 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1791 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1793 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1794 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1795 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1799 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1800 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1802 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1803 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1804 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1805 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1809 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1810 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1812 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1814 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1818 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1819 which have negative errno values.
1823 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1827 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1831 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1832 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1835 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1839 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1840 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1843 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1844 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1845 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1846 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1850 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1851 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1852 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1853 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1856 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1860 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1862 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1863 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1864 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1867 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1871 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1872 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1874 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1876 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1878 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1880 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1884 ** Changes in behavior
1886 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1887 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1889 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1890 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1892 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1893 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1894 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1898 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1899 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1900 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1901 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1902 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1903 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1904 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1905 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1906 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1907 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1908 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1910 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1911 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1912 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1915 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1918 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1919 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1920 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1922 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1923 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1924 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1927 ** New build options
1929 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1930 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1931 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1932 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1934 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1935 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1936 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1937 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1938 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1939 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1940 of "make check" fail.
1942 ** Remove deprecated options
1944 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1945 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1946 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1947 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1948 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1950 ** Improved robustness
1952 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1953 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1954 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1955 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1956 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1957 loss of the contents of a/f.
1959 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1960 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1964 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1965 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1966 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1968 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1969 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1970 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1971 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1973 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1974 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1975 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1976 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1977 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1978 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1979 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1980 destination is a symlink.
1982 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1984 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1985 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1987 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1988 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1990 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1992 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1993 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1995 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1996 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1998 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2001 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2002 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2004 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2005 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2007 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2008 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2009 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2010 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2012 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2013 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2014 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2016 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2017 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2018 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2020 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2021 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2022 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2023 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2025 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2026 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2027 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2029 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2030 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2032 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2033 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2035 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2037 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2038 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2039 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2041 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2042 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2044 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2045 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2047 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2048 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2050 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2051 [present in the original version]
2054 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2058 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2060 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2061 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2062 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2064 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2065 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2067 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2071 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2072 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2074 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2075 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2077 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2078 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2080 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2081 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2082 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2083 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2084 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2085 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2087 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2088 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2091 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2092 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2094 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2097 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2098 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2099 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2101 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2102 directory is unreadable.
2104 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2105 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2106 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2108 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2109 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2110 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2111 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2112 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2115 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2116 Before it would print nothing.
2118 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2120 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2121 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2122 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2123 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2124 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2125 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2126 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2127 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2129 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2133 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2134 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2135 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2137 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2138 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2139 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2140 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2143 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2147 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2148 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2149 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2150 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2151 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2152 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2153 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2155 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2156 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2157 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2158 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2159 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2160 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2161 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2162 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2164 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2165 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2166 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2169 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2173 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2174 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2176 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2177 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2178 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2180 ** Improved robustness
2182 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2183 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2184 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2187 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2191 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2192 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2193 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2194 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2195 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2197 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2201 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2204 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2208 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2209 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2210 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2211 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2213 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2214 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2216 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2217 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2218 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2221 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2223 ** Improved robustness
2225 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2226 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2228 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2229 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2230 or NFS-mounted partition.
2232 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2233 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2237 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2238 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2239 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2240 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2241 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2242 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2244 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2245 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2247 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2248 or neglect to report file removal.
2250 For the "groups" command:
2252 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2253 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2255 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2257 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2259 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2263 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2264 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2267 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2269 ** Changes in behavior
2271 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2272 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2273 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2274 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2276 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2277 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2278 a final './' or '../' component.
2280 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2281 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2282 this only for pipes.
2284 ** Infrastructure changes
2286 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2287 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2288 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2289 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2293 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2294 name is "." or "..".
2296 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2297 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2298 dirent.d_type support.
2300 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2301 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2303 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2304 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2305 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2306 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2309 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2311 ** Changes in behavior
2313 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2317 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2318 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2322 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2323 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2324 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2326 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2327 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2329 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2330 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2332 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2334 ** Improved robustness
2336 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2337 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2338 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2340 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2341 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2344 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2345 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2347 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2348 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2350 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2351 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2353 ** Changes in behavior
2355 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2356 where the two are distinct.
2358 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2359 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2360 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2361 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2362 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2363 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2364 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2365 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2366 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2367 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2368 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2369 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2370 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2371 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2372 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2373 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2374 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2376 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2377 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2378 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2380 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2381 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2382 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2383 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2386 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2387 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2391 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2392 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2393 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2394 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2396 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2397 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2398 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2400 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2401 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2402 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2403 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2404 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2407 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2408 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2410 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2411 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2412 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2413 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2415 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2416 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2417 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2419 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2420 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2421 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2422 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2424 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2425 and sticky) with the -m option.
2427 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2428 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2429 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2430 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2431 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2433 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2434 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2436 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2440 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2441 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2442 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2443 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2445 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2447 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2449 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2450 silently ignoring one of them.
2452 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2453 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2454 containing this change was 5.92.
2456 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2457 automatically newline terminated.
2459 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2460 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2461 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2462 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2465 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2466 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2467 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2470 ** Scheduled for removal
2472 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2473 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2475 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2476 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2477 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2478 command to unlink a directory.
2480 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2481 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2482 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2483 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2487 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2488 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2489 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2490 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2491 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2492 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2496 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2497 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2499 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2501 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2502 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2503 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2505 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2506 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2509 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2510 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2512 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2513 list directories before files.
2515 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2516 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2517 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2518 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2521 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2523 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2525 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2526 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2527 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2529 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2530 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2534 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2535 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2536 usually printing nothing.
2538 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2540 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2541 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2542 them with hard-linked directories.
2544 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2545 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2546 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2548 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2549 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2550 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2552 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2555 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2556 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2558 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2559 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2561 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2562 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2564 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2565 all command-line arguments.
2567 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2569 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2571 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2572 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2574 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2576 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2577 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2578 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2579 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2580 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2582 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2583 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2585 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2586 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2587 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2588 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2590 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2592 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2596 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2597 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2599 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2600 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2602 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2603 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2605 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2606 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2608 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2609 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2611 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2613 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2614 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2615 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2618 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2620 ** Build-related bug fixes
2622 installing .mo files would fail
2625 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2629 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2631 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2634 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2638 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2639 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2643 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2645 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2646 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2648 ** Deprecated options
2650 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2651 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2653 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2657 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2659 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2660 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2661 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2662 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2664 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2667 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2673 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2678 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2680 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2682 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2683 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2684 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2686 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2687 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2688 problematic usages. These include:
2690 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2691 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2692 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2693 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2694 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2695 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2696 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2697 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2698 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2700 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2701 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2703 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2704 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2705 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2706 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2708 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2709 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2710 between binary and text files.
2712 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2716 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2720 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2721 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2723 head tac tail tee tr
2724 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2726 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2727 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2729 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2730 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2731 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2733 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2735 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2737 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2738 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2739 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2743 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2745 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2746 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2748 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2749 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2750 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2754 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2755 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2759 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2760 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2761 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2765 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2766 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2770 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2772 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2774 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2778 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2779 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2780 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2782 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2783 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2784 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2785 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2786 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2788 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2792 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2793 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2794 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2796 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2798 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2799 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2800 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2801 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2803 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2805 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2806 rather than silently wrapping around.
2808 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2809 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2811 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2812 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2814 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2815 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2816 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2817 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2819 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2821 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2823 ** Improved robustness
2825 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2826 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2827 no matter how large the result.
2829 ** Improved portability
2831 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2832 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2834 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2836 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2837 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2838 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2840 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2841 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2845 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2846 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2848 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2850 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2851 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2852 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2853 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2855 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2856 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2858 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2859 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2860 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2862 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2864 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2865 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2867 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2868 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2870 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2872 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2873 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2875 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2876 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2878 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2879 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2880 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2882 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2884 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2886 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2890 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2892 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2893 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2894 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2896 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2897 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2899 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2900 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2901 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2903 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2904 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2906 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2907 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2908 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2909 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2911 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2912 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2914 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2915 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2916 the file system does not support it.
2918 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2920 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2921 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2923 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2925 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2926 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2928 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2929 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2930 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2931 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2933 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2934 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2937 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2938 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2939 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2940 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2942 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2943 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2944 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2945 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2947 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2948 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2950 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2952 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2953 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2954 reporting incorrect results.
2958 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2959 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2961 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2964 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2966 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2967 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2969 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2970 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2972 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2975 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2976 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2977 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2978 the file name does not look like a page range.
2980 printf has several changes:
2982 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2983 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2985 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2986 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2987 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2989 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2990 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2993 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2994 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2996 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2997 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2999 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3001 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3002 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3004 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3006 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3008 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3009 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3010 when first encountering the directory.
3014 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3015 output; POSIX requires this.
3017 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3018 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3020 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3022 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3023 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3025 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3026 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3028 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3029 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3030 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3031 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3032 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3033 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3034 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3036 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3037 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3038 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3040 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3041 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3043 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3045 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3047 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3048 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3049 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3050 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3052 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3056 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3057 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3058 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3059 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3060 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3062 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3063 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3064 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3066 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3067 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3069 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3070 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3072 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3073 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3074 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3075 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3076 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3078 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3079 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3081 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3082 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3084 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3086 nocreat do not create the output file
3087 excl fail if the output file already exists
3088 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3089 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3091 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3093 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3094 direct use direct I/O for data
3095 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3096 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3097 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3098 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3099 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3101 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3103 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3104 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3107 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3108 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3109 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3110 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3111 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3112 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3114 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3115 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3117 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3120 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3122 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3124 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3125 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3127 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3128 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3129 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3131 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3132 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3133 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3135 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3137 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3138 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3140 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3141 for compatibility with bash.
3143 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3145 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3146 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3147 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3148 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3150 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3151 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3153 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3154 ls supports TABSIZE.
3155 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3156 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3157 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3159 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3162 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3164 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3165 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3166 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3167 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3168 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3169 an offset, not as a file name.
3171 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3172 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3174 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3175 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3177 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3178 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3180 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3181 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3182 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3184 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3185 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3187 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3188 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3192 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3194 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3196 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3200 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3201 or more arguments between partitions.
3203 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3204 holes in the destination.
3206 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3207 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3208 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3209 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3210 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3211 terminates immediately.
3213 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3215 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3217 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3218 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3219 not the empty string.
3221 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3222 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3226 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3227 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3228 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3231 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3238 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3242 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3243 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3245 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3246 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3248 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3249 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3250 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3253 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3257 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3258 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3260 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3261 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3263 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3264 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3265 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3267 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3269 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3272 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3274 ** Configuration option
3276 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3277 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3281 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3282 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3286 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3287 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3288 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3291 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3292 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3293 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3294 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3295 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3296 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3297 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3300 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3304 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3305 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3306 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3308 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3309 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3311 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3313 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3314 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3315 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3316 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3318 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3320 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3321 not just the ones that reference directories
3323 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3324 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3326 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3327 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3328 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3330 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3331 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3332 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3333 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3334 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3335 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3337 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3342 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3343 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3345 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3347 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3349 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3351 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3352 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3354 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3355 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3357 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3359 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3363 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3365 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3367 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3368 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3369 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3370 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3371 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3373 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3374 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3376 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3377 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3379 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3380 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3382 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3383 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3384 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3388 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3389 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3390 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3391 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3392 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3393 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3394 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3395 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3396 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3397 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3398 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3399 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3400 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3401 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3403 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3405 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3406 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3408 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3410 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3412 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3413 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3415 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3417 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3418 without a trailing newline.
3420 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3421 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3423 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3426 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3430 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3432 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3434 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3435 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3436 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3437 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3439 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3441 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3442 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3443 be printed without leading spaces.
3445 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3446 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3451 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3452 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3453 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3455 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3457 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3458 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3460 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3461 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3463 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3464 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3466 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3468 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3470 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3472 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3473 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3475 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3477 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3479 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3480 byte offsets are specified.
3483 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3486 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3489 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3490 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3491 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3492 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3493 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3494 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3495 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3496 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3497 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3498 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3499 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3500 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3501 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3502 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3503 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3504 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3505 directory where M has write access.
3506 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3507 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3508 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3511 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3512 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3513 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3514 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3515 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3516 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3517 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3518 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3519 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3520 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3521 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3522 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3523 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3524 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3525 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3526 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3527 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3528 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3529 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3530 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3531 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3532 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3533 appeared one additional time.
3535 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3536 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3537 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3538 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3541 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3542 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3543 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3544 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3545 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3546 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3547 if there were more than 338.
3549 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3550 - false --help now exits nonzero
3553 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3554 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3555 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3556 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3559 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3560 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3561 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3562 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3563 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3566 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3567 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3568 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3569 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3570 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3571 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3572 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3575 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3576 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3577 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3578 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3579 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3580 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3582 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3583 under certain unusual conditions
3584 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3585 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3588 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3589 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3590 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3591 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3592 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3593 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3594 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3595 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3596 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3597 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3598 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3599 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3600 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3601 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3602 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3603 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3606 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3607 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3610 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3611 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3612 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3613 involving hard-linked directories
3614 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3615 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3616 character-special and block files
3619 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3620 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3621 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3622 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3623 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3624 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3625 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3626 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3627 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3629 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3630 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3631 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3632 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3633 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3634 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3635 specified on the command line.
3636 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3637 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3638 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3639 the first file untouched.
3640 * readlink: new program
3641 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3642 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3643 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3644 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3645 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3646 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3649 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3650 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3651 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3652 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3653 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3654 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3655 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3656 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3657 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3658 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3659 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3660 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3662 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3663 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3664 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3666 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3667 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3668 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3669 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3670 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3671 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3672 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3673 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3676 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3677 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3680 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3681 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3682 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3683 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3684 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3685 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3686 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3689 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3690 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3692 ========================================================================
3693 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3694 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3697 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3699 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3700 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3701 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3702 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3703 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3704 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3705 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3706 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3707 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3708 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3709 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3710 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3712 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3713 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3714 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3715 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3717 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3720 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3722 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3723 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3724 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3725 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3726 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3727 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3728 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3731 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3732 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3733 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3734 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3735 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3736 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3737 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3738 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3739 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3740 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3741 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3742 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3743 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3744 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3745 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3746 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3748 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3749 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3751 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3752 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3753 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3754 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3755 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3756 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3758 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3759 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3760 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3761 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3762 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3763 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3764 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3766 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3767 the source files in the following example:
3768 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3769 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3770 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3771 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3772 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3773 links between source files with --preserve=links
3774 * cp accepts new options:
3775 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3776 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3777 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3778 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3779 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3780 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3781 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3782 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3783 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3785 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3786 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3787 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3788 even though it's older than dest.
3789 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3790 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3791 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3792 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3793 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3795 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3796 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3797 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3798 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3799 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3800 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3801 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3803 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3804 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3805 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3807 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3808 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3809 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3810 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3811 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3812 This is the default.
3814 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3815 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3816 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3817 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3818 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3820 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3823 ========================================================================
3824 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3825 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3828 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3829 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3831 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3832 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3833 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3834 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3835 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3837 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3838 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3839 that specifies a non-directory
3842 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3843 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3844 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3845 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3846 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3847 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3848 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3849 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3850 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3851 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3852 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3853 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3854 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3855 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3856 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3857 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3858 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3859 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3860 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3861 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3862 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3863 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3864 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3865 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3867 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3868 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3869 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3871 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3873 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3874 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3876 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3877 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3878 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3879 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3880 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3882 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3883 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3884 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3885 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3886 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3888 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3890 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3891 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3892 * still more portability fixes
3893 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3894 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3896 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3898 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3900 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3902 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3903 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3904 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3905 there is any time remaining
3906 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3908 ========================================================================
3909 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3910 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3912 This package began as the union of the following:
3913 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3915 ========================================================================
3917 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3919 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3920 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3921 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3922 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3923 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3924 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.