1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
8 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
9 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
10 total line in this case.
11 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
13 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
14 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
17 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
20 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
21 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
22 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
25 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
26 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
27 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
28 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
29 which may have resulted in data corruption.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
32 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
33 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
34 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
36 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
37 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
39 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
40 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
41 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
43 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
44 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
45 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
47 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
48 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
49 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
51 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
52 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
53 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
54 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
55 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
57 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
58 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
59 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
60 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
61 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
63 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
64 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
65 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
67 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
68 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
69 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
71 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
72 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
73 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
74 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
76 ** Changes in behavior
78 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
79 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
80 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
81 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
82 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
83 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
85 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
86 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
88 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
89 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
90 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
91 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
93 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
94 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
95 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
97 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
98 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
99 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
100 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
102 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
103 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
104 This behavior is now documented.
106 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
107 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
109 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
110 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
111 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
113 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
114 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
115 from errors from the invoked command.
117 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
118 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
119 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
122 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
126 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
127 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
129 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
130 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
132 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
133 print details on how a file is being copied.
135 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
136 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
138 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
139 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
141 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
142 asked to move a file to a different file system.
144 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
145 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
147 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
148 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
150 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
151 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
155 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
156 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
157 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
158 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
159 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
161 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
162 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
164 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
165 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
167 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
168 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
169 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
171 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
172 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
173 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
175 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
176 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
178 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
179 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
180 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
181 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
184 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
188 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
189 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
192 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
193 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
194 before adjusting it to the correct value.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
197 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
198 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
201 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
202 and B is in some other file system.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
205 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
206 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
207 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
209 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
212 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
213 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
214 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
215 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
218 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
219 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
222 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
223 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
226 ** Changes in behavior
228 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
229 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
230 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
232 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
233 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
234 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
235 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
237 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
238 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
240 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
241 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
242 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
244 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
245 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
247 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
248 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
249 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
250 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
251 though they still work.
253 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
254 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
255 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
257 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
258 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
260 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
261 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
262 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
264 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
265 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
266 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
267 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
271 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
272 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
274 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
275 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
277 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
278 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
282 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
283 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
285 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
286 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
287 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
290 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
292 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
293 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
294 since synchronizing can take a long time.
296 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
298 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
299 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
301 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
303 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
304 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
305 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
309 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
313 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
317 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
320 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
321 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
322 is a non regular file.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
325 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
326 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
327 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
329 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
332 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
335 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
336 heavily changed during the run.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
339 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
342 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
345 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
348 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
351 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
352 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
353 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
355 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
358 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
359 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
361 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
362 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
365 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
366 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
369 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
370 invalid combinations of case character classes.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
373 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
374 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
377 ** Changes in behavior
379 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
380 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
382 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
383 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
384 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
386 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
387 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
388 that was made in release 8.32.
390 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
391 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
392 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
394 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
395 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
397 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
398 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
402 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
403 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
404 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
405 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
407 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
409 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
410 when verifying tagged format checksums.
412 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
414 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
415 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
417 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
418 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
420 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
421 NUL instead of newline.
423 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
425 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
426 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
427 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
431 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
432 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
434 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
435 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
436 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
438 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
439 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
441 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
442 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
444 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
445 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
447 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
448 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
449 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
451 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
453 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
454 where avx2 instructions are supported.
455 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
458 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
462 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
463 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
464 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
466 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
467 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
468 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
469 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
470 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
472 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
473 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
474 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
475 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
476 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
477 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
479 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
482 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
483 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
484 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
485 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
487 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
488 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
489 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
492 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
493 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
495 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
496 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
497 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
498 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
500 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
501 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
504 ** Changes in behavior
506 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
507 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
508 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
509 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
510 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
513 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
514 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
515 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
516 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
517 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
518 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
519 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
520 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
523 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
524 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
525 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
526 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
528 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
529 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
530 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
532 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
533 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
537 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
538 file creation time, where available.
540 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
541 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
543 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
544 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
545 useful on network file systems.
549 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
550 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
552 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
553 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
554 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
558 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
561 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
565 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
568 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
569 after asking the user whether to proceed.
570 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
572 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
573 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
575 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
576 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
579 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
580 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
581 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
582 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
583 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
584 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
586 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
587 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
589 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
592 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
593 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
594 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
596 ** Changes in behavior
598 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
599 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
600 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
601 end-of-options marker.
603 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
606 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
607 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
609 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
610 environment variable is set.
612 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
613 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
614 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
615 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
616 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
618 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
620 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
621 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
622 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
623 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
625 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
626 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
630 id now supports specifying multiple users.
632 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
633 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
635 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
636 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
637 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
638 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
639 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
640 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
642 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
643 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
645 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
646 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
648 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
649 signal handling before executing a program.
653 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
654 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
655 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
659 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
660 which is common in Asian locales.
662 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
663 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
665 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
666 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
673 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
674 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
675 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
676 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
677 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
678 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
680 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
681 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
682 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
683 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
685 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
686 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
687 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
688 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
689 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
690 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
692 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
693 even if it can't be traversed.
694 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
696 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
697 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
698 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
700 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
703 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
704 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
705 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
706 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
707 now silently does nothing if A exists.
708 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
710 ** Changes in behavior
712 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
713 it is self referential.
715 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
719 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
721 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
722 each processing step.
724 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
725 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
728 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
729 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
730 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
732 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
733 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
737 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
738 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
740 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
741 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
742 and tail -f uses inotify.
744 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
745 which is especially significant on macOS.
748 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
752 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
753 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
755 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
756 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
757 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
758 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
760 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
761 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
763 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
764 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
766 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
767 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
768 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
770 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
771 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
773 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
774 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
777 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
778 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
779 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
780 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
785 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
789 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
791 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
792 rather than reading from the start.
794 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
795 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
796 for unknown long options.
800 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
801 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
804 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
808 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
809 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
810 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
811 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
813 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
814 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
815 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
816 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
817 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
819 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
820 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
821 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
822 now fails instead of losing the data.
823 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
825 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
826 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
827 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
829 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
830 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
833 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
834 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
835 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
837 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
838 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
839 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
841 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
842 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
845 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
846 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
847 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
849 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
850 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
851 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
853 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
854 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
855 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
857 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
858 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
860 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
861 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
864 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
865 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
867 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
868 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
869 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
870 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
872 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
873 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
874 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
876 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
877 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
880 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
881 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
885 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
886 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
887 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
889 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
890 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
892 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
893 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
895 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
896 executing the subsidiary program.
898 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
900 ** Changes in behavior
902 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
903 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
904 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
905 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
909 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
911 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
912 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
914 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
915 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
916 is effective in this case.
919 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
923 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
924 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
925 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
927 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
928 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
931 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
932 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
933 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
935 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
936 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
939 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
940 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
941 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
943 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
944 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
945 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
946 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
947 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
949 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
950 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
951 depending on the size of the first file processed.
952 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
956 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
957 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
958 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
959 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
961 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
962 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
963 time zone is indeterminate.
965 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
966 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
967 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
968 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
970 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
971 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
972 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
974 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
975 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
977 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
978 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
979 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
983 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
984 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
985 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
988 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
992 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
993 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
996 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
997 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
998 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1000 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1001 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1002 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1003 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1004 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1006 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1007 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1008 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1010 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1013 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1014 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1017 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1018 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1019 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1021 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1022 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1024 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1025 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1026 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1028 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1029 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1031 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1032 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1033 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1035 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1037 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1038 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1040 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1041 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1043 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1044 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1046 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1047 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1049 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1050 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1051 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1052 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1054 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1055 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1056 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1058 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1059 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1060 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1062 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1063 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1066 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1067 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1068 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1070 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1071 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1073 ** Changes in behavior
1075 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1077 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1078 values for any argument.
1080 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1081 they are out of localtime range.
1083 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1084 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1085 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1086 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1090 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1091 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1092 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1094 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1095 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1097 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1098 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1100 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1102 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1103 written to a terminal.
1105 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1106 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1108 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1109 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1110 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1111 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1112 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1113 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1114 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1115 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1116 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1117 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1118 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1120 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1121 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1125 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1126 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1130 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1132 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1133 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1135 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1138 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1142 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1143 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1144 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1147 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1148 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1150 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1151 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1154 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1157 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1158 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1161 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1162 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1164 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1165 that specify an offset for the first field.
1166 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1168 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1173 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1174 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1178 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1179 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1181 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1182 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1183 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1184 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1185 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1187 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1188 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1189 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1191 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1192 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1193 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1195 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1196 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1198 ** Changes in behavior
1200 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1201 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1203 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1204 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1206 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1207 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1209 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1210 when outputting to a terminal.
1212 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1216 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1217 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1219 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1220 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1222 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1223 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1224 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1226 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1227 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1229 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1230 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1231 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1233 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1235 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1236 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1237 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1239 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1240 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1243 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1247 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1248 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1250 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1253 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1254 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1255 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1257 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1258 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1259 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1260 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1262 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1263 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1264 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1265 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1267 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1268 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1270 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1271 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1273 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1274 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1275 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1277 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1278 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1279 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1281 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1282 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1283 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1285 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1286 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1287 character at the 4GiB position.
1288 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1290 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1291 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1293 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1294 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1296 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1297 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1298 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1300 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1303 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1304 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1305 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1307 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1308 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1310 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1311 when those files are being created or renamed.
1312 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1316 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1317 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1318 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1319 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1321 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1322 on stderr approximately every second.
1324 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1325 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1327 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1328 other than the default newline character.
1330 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1331 a useful setting with high latency links.
1333 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1334 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1336 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1337 and output errors in general.
1339 ** Changes in behavior
1341 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1342 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1343 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1344 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1346 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1347 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1348 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1349 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1350 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1352 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1353 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1355 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1357 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1358 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1360 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1361 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1365 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1366 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1368 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1369 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1371 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1372 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1374 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1375 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1377 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1379 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1380 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1381 documentation are provided.
1384 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1388 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1389 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1391 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1392 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1393 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1394 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1396 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1397 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1398 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1399 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1401 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1402 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1404 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1405 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1407 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1408 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1409 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1410 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1411 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1412 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1413 values are in octal.
1426 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1428 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1429 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1430 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1431 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1432 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1433 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1435 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1436 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1437 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1440 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1441 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1444 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1445 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1446 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1447 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1449 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1450 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1451 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1453 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1454 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1455 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1457 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1458 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1459 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1460 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1461 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1463 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1464 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1465 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1467 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1468 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1470 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1471 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1472 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1474 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1475 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1477 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1478 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1480 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1481 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1483 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1484 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1486 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1487 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1488 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1490 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1491 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1495 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1496 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1498 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1499 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1500 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1501 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1502 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1503 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1504 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1505 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1506 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1507 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1508 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1509 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1510 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1511 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1512 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1513 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1514 it suitable for embedded system.
1516 ** Changes in behavior
1518 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1519 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1521 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1522 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1524 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1525 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1526 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1528 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1529 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1530 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1534 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1535 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1536 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1538 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1540 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1541 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1542 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1544 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1545 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1546 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1547 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1549 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1550 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1552 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1553 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1554 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1561 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1562 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1563 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1565 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1566 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1567 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1568 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1570 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1571 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1572 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1574 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1575 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1577 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1579 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1580 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1581 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1583 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1584 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1585 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1587 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1588 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1589 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1590 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1592 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1593 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1594 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1596 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1597 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1598 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1600 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1601 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1603 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1604 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1605 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1606 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1608 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1609 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1610 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1612 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1613 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1614 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1618 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1619 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1620 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1622 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1623 used to identify the split points.
1625 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1626 command line argument through to the output.
1628 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1631 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1632 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1634 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1635 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1637 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1639 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1640 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1641 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1643 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1644 unique groups with empty lines.
1646 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1647 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1649 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1652 ** Changes in behavior
1654 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1655 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1656 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1657 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1659 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1660 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1662 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1663 not just the transfer counts.
1665 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1667 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1668 as per the documented interface.
1672 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1674 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1675 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1676 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1677 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1679 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1680 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1681 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1682 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1684 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1685 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1686 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1688 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1689 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1691 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1692 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1694 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1698 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1701 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1705 numfmt: reformat numbers
1709 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1710 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1711 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1713 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1714 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1715 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1717 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1718 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1722 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1723 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1725 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1726 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1727 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1729 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1730 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1731 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1733 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1734 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1735 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1737 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1738 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1739 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1741 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1742 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1743 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1745 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1746 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1748 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1749 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1751 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1752 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1753 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1755 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1756 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1757 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1759 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1760 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1761 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1763 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1764 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1765 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1766 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1768 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1769 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1770 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1772 ** Changes in behavior
1774 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1775 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1776 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1777 'total' in the target column.
1779 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1780 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1781 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1783 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1784 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1786 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1787 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1791 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1792 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1794 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1795 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1797 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1801 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1802 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1803 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1804 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1805 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1806 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1807 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1808 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1809 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1810 for a patched distribution package.
1812 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1813 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1815 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1816 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1817 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1818 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1821 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1825 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1827 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1828 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1829 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1833 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1834 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1835 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1836 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1837 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1839 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1840 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1842 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1843 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1844 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1845 eventually exits nonzero.
1847 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1848 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1849 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1850 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1851 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1853 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1854 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1855 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1857 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1858 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1859 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1861 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1862 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1863 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1865 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1866 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1867 Before, this would infloop:
1868 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1869 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1871 ** Changes in behavior
1873 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1877 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1878 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1879 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1880 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1881 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1884 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1885 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1886 format-changing options.
1888 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1889 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1890 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1891 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1892 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1896 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1897 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1898 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1899 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1900 are run without following the instructions in README.
1902 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1903 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1904 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1905 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1906 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1907 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1908 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1911 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1915 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1916 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1917 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1918 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1920 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1921 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1922 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1923 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1925 sort -u could read freed memory.
1926 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1927 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1928 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1932 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1933 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1934 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1935 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1938 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1942 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1943 processes will not intersperse their output.
1944 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1946 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1947 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1948 date: invalid date '\260'
1949 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1951 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1952 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1953 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1954 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1956 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1957 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1958 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1960 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1961 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1962 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1963 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1964 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1965 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1967 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1968 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1970 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1971 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1973 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1974 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1975 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1977 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1978 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1979 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1983 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1985 ** Changes in behavior
1987 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1988 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1989 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1990 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1991 have any reason to include it here.
1995 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1996 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1997 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1999 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2000 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2001 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2004 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2008 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2009 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2010 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2011 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2012 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2013 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2015 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2016 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2017 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2018 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2019 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2020 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2021 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2023 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2024 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2026 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2027 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2031 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2032 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2034 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2036 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2038 ** Changes in behavior
2040 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2041 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2042 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2044 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2045 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2048 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2052 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2053 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2054 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2055 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2056 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2057 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2058 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2059 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2061 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2062 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2063 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2064 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2065 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2067 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2068 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2070 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2071 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2073 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2074 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2076 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2077 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2079 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2080 additional static suffix to output file names.
2082 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2083 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2084 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2086 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2087 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2091 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2092 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2095 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2096 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2097 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2098 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2099 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2100 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2102 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2103 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2104 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2105 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2106 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2108 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2109 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2110 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2111 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2115 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2116 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2117 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2119 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2120 instead of causing a usage failure.
2122 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2129 realpath: print resolved file names.
2133 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2134 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2136 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2137 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2139 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2140 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2141 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2142 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2143 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2144 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2146 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2147 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2148 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2150 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2151 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2152 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2154 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2155 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2156 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2157 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2160 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2162 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2163 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2165 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2166 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2167 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2169 ** Changes in behavior
2171 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2172 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2173 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2174 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2175 usually-short referent instead.
2177 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2178 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2179 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2180 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2187 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2188 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2189 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2191 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2194 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2199 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2200 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2202 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2203 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2204 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2205 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2207 ** Changes in behavior
2209 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2210 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2211 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2215 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2216 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2217 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2220 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2224 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2225 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2226 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2228 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2229 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2231 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2232 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2233 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2234 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2235 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2237 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2238 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2239 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2240 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2241 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2242 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2243 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2244 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2246 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2247 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2249 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2250 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2252 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2253 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2255 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2256 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2257 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2259 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2260 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2261 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2262 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2264 ** Changes in behavior
2266 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2267 when -v or -c specified.
2269 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2270 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2274 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2275 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2276 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2277 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2278 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2280 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2281 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2282 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2284 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2285 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2286 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2287 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2288 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2289 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2290 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2292 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2293 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2294 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2298 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2299 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2301 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2304 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2305 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2307 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2308 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2310 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2311 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2313 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2315 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2319 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2320 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2322 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2325 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2329 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2330 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2332 ** Changes in behavior
2334 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2335 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2336 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2337 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2338 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2339 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2340 resolved for 2.6.39.
2341 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2342 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2343 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2347 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2350 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2354 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2355 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2358 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2359 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2362 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2363 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2364 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2366 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2369 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2370 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2372 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2375 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2376 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2380 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2381 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2382 processed portion thereof.
2384 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2385 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2387 ** Changes in behavior
2389 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2390 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2391 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2393 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2394 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2395 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2397 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2398 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2400 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2401 Use --preserve-context instead.
2403 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2406 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2410 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2411 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2412 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2413 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2414 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2416 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2417 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2419 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2420 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2421 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2423 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2424 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2426 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2427 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2431 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2432 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2433 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2434 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2435 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2436 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2437 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2438 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2440 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2441 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2442 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2444 ** Changes in behavior
2446 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2447 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2448 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2451 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2455 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2456 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2457 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2460 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2464 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2465 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2467 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2468 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2470 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2471 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2473 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2474 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2475 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2476 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2478 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2479 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2481 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2482 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2483 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2485 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2487 ** Changes in behavior
2489 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2490 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2491 to the number of available processors.
2495 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2496 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2497 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2500 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2504 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2505 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2506 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2507 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2509 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2510 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2511 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2513 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2514 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2516 ** Changes in behavior
2518 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2519 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2521 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2522 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2523 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2524 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2525 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2526 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2528 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2529 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2530 the same way as the others.
2532 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2533 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2536 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2540 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2541 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2542 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2544 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2545 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2547 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2548 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2549 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2551 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2552 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2554 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2555 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2557 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2558 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2559 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2561 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2562 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2563 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2564 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2568 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2569 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2571 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2574 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2575 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2577 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2579 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2580 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2581 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2583 ** Changes in behavior
2585 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2586 rather than its aliased target.
2588 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2589 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2590 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2592 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2593 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2594 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2595 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2596 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2597 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2598 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2599 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2601 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2603 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2605 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2606 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2609 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2610 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2611 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2612 control like taskset for example.
2614 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2616 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2617 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2618 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2619 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2620 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2621 includes %C when context information is available.
2623 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2624 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2625 rather than a file system attribute.
2627 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2628 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2629 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2630 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2632 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2633 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2634 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2636 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2637 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2638 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2641 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2645 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2646 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2648 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2650 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2651 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2653 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2654 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2655 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2656 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2658 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2659 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2660 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2664 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2665 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2667 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2668 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2669 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2671 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2672 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2673 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2674 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2675 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2676 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2677 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2678 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2679 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2681 ** Changes in behavior
2683 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2684 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2686 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2687 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2690 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2694 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2695 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2696 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2697 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2701 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2702 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2704 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2705 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2706 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2707 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2709 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2710 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2711 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2714 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2718 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2719 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2720 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2722 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2723 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2724 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2726 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2727 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2729 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2730 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2731 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2732 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2734 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2735 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2736 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2738 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2739 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2740 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2741 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2743 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2744 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2745 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2747 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2748 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2749 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2752 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2753 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2754 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2756 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2757 processes will not intersperse their output.
2758 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2761 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2765 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2766 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2768 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2769 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2771 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2772 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2773 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2774 the presence of the empty string argument.
2775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2777 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2778 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2779 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2780 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2782 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2783 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2785 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2786 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2787 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2789 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2790 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2791 and with a malicious user on the same system
2792 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2793 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2796 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2800 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2801 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2804 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2805 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2806 offending directory and all "contents."
2808 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2809 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2810 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2812 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2813 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2814 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2816 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2817 processes will not intersperse their output.
2818 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2819 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2821 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2822 output the name of the file to stdout.
2823 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2825 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2826 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2827 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2829 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2830 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2833 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2834 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2835 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2837 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2838 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2839 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2840 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2841 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2842 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2844 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2845 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2846 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2847 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2849 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2850 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2852 ** Changes in behavior
2854 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2855 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2856 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2857 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2858 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2860 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2861 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2862 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2863 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2865 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2867 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2868 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2869 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2870 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2871 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2875 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2879 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2880 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2882 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2883 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2885 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2886 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2887 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2889 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2890 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2893 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2897 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2898 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2899 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2901 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2902 to accommodate leap seconds.
2903 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2905 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2906 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2907 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2909 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2911 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2912 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2913 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2915 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2916 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2917 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2918 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2919 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2923 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2924 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2925 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2926 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2928 ** Changes in behavior
2930 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2931 environment variable is set.
2933 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2934 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2935 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2939 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2940 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2941 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2942 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2944 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2945 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2946 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2947 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2951 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2952 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2953 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2955 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2956 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2957 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2958 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2959 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2960 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2961 another improvement:
2963 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2964 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2967 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2971 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2972 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2973 and libraries tested at configure time.
2974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2976 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2977 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2979 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2980 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2982 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2983 printing a summary to stderr.
2984 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2986 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2987 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2988 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2990 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2991 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2993 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2994 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2995 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2996 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2998 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2999 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3000 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3001 which is relatively unusual.
3002 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3004 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3005 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3006 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3007 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3008 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3009 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3010 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3014 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3015 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3016 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3017 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3018 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3022 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3023 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3025 ** Changes in behavior
3027 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3028 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3029 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3030 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3031 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3034 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3038 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3039 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3041 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3042 before data copying has started.
3044 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3045 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3047 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3048 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3049 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3050 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3052 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3053 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3054 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3055 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3057 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3062 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3063 for its standard streams.
3065 ** Changes in behavior
3067 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3068 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3069 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3070 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3071 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3072 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3074 ** Deprecated options
3076 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3077 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3081 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3083 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3084 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3085 a btrfs file system.
3087 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3089 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3090 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3092 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3093 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3096 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3100 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3101 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3102 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3103 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3105 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3106 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3107 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3108 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3109 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3114 make check: two tests have been corrected
3118 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3119 inherited from gnulib.
3122 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3126 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3127 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3128 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3129 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3131 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3132 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3134 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3136 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3137 systems without xattr support.
3139 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3140 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3141 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3143 ** Changes in behavior
3145 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3146 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3147 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3148 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3150 ** Improved robustness
3152 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3153 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3154 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3155 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3156 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3157 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3158 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3159 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3160 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3164 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3165 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3167 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3168 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3169 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3170 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3171 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3174 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3178 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3179 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3180 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3184 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3185 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3186 data was read, or on process exit.
3187 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3189 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3190 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3191 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3194 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3195 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3196 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3197 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3199 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3200 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3202 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3203 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3205 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3206 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3207 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3209 ** Changes in behavior
3211 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3212 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3213 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3215 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3216 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3218 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3219 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3220 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3223 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3227 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3229 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3230 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3231 install: Never copies xattrs
3233 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3234 from overwriting any existing destination file
3236 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3237 mode where this feature is available.
3239 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3240 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3241 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3242 do not modify the destination at all.
3244 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3246 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3250 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3251 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3253 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3255 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3256 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3258 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3259 processing the first file name
3261 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3262 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3263 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3264 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3266 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3267 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3269 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3270 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3273 ** Changes in behavior
3275 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3276 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3278 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3279 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3280 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3282 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3283 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3285 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3287 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3288 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3289 is still marked with a '+'.
3292 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3296 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3297 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3301 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3302 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3303 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3304 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3305 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3306 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3308 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3309 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3311 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3312 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3314 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3316 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3317 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3318 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3320 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3321 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3323 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3324 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3325 used to factor large numbers.
3327 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3330 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3332 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3334 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3335 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3337 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3338 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3339 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3340 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3342 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3343 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3344 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3346 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3347 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3351 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3353 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3354 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3356 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3357 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3359 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3361 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3362 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3366 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3367 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3368 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3370 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3372 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3373 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3374 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3376 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3377 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3378 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3380 ** Changes in behavior
3382 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3383 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3386 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3390 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3391 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3392 'futimens' system calls.
3396 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3398 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3399 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3400 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3402 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3403 with no USERNAME argument.
3405 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3406 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3407 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3409 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3410 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3411 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3412 number of fields for some inputs.
3414 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3415 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3417 ** Changes in behavior
3419 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3420 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3423 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3427 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3429 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3430 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3431 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3432 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3434 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3435 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3437 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3438 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3440 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3441 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3443 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3444 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3445 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3446 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3448 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3449 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3450 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3451 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3452 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3453 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3455 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3456 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3458 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3459 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3460 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3462 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3463 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3465 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3466 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3468 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3469 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3470 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3471 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3473 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3474 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3476 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3477 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3479 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3480 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3481 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3485 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3486 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3488 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3489 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3490 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3491 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3495 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3496 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3498 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3500 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3504 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3505 which have negative errno values.
3509 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3513 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3517 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3518 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3521 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3525 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3526 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3527 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3529 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3530 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3531 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3532 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3536 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3537 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3538 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3539 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3542 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3546 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3548 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3549 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3550 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3553 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3557 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3558 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3560 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3562 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3564 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3566 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3570 ** Changes in behavior
3572 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3573 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3575 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3576 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3578 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3579 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3580 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3584 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3585 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3586 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3587 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3588 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3589 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3590 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3591 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3592 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3593 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3594 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3596 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3597 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3598 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3601 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3604 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3605 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3606 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3608 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3609 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3610 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3613 ** New build options
3615 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3616 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3617 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3618 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3620 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3621 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3622 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3623 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3624 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3625 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3626 of "make check" fail.
3628 ** Remove deprecated options
3630 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3631 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3632 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3633 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3634 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3636 ** Improved robustness
3638 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3639 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3640 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3641 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3642 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3643 loss of the contents of a/f.
3645 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3646 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3650 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3651 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3652 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3654 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3655 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3656 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3657 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3659 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3660 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3661 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3662 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3663 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3664 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3665 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3666 destination is a symlink.
3668 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3670 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3671 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3673 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3674 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3676 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3678 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3679 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3681 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3682 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3684 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3687 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3688 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3690 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3691 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3693 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3694 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3695 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3696 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3698 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3699 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3700 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3702 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3703 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3704 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3706 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3707 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3708 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3709 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3711 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3712 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3713 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3715 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3716 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3718 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3719 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3721 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3723 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3724 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3725 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3727 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3728 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3730 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3731 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3733 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3734 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3736 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3737 [present in the original version]
3740 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3744 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3746 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3747 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3748 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3750 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3751 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3753 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3757 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3758 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3760 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3761 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3763 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3764 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3766 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3767 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3768 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3769 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3770 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3771 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3773 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3774 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3777 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3778 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3780 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3783 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3784 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3785 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3787 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3788 directory is unreadable.
3790 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3791 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3792 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3794 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3795 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3796 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3797 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3798 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3801 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3802 Before it would print nothing.
3804 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3806 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3807 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3808 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3809 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3810 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3811 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3812 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3813 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3815 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3819 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3820 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3821 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3823 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3824 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3825 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3826 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3829 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3833 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3834 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3835 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3836 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3837 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3838 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3839 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3841 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3842 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3843 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3844 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3845 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3846 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3847 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3848 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3850 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3851 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3852 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3855 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3859 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3860 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3862 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3863 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3864 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3866 ** Improved robustness
3868 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3869 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3870 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3873 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3877 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3878 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3879 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3880 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3881 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3883 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3887 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3890 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3894 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3895 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3896 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3897 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3899 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3900 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3902 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3903 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3904 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3907 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3909 ** Improved robustness
3911 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3912 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3914 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3915 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3916 or NFS-mounted partition.
3918 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3919 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3923 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3924 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3925 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3926 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3927 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3928 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3930 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3931 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3933 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3934 or neglect to report file removal.
3936 For the "groups" command:
3938 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3939 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3941 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3943 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3945 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3949 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3950 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3953 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3955 ** Changes in behavior
3957 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3958 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3959 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3960 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3962 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3963 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3964 a final './' or '../' component.
3966 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3967 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3968 this only for pipes.
3970 ** Infrastructure changes
3972 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3973 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3974 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3975 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3979 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3980 name is "." or "..".
3982 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3983 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3984 dirent.d_type support.
3986 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3987 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3989 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3990 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3991 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3992 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3995 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3997 ** Changes in behavior
3999 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4003 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4004 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4008 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4009 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4010 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4012 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4013 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4015 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4016 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4018 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4020 ** Improved robustness
4022 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4023 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4024 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4026 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4027 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4030 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4031 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4033 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4034 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4036 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4037 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4039 ** Changes in behavior
4041 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4042 where the two are distinct.
4044 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4045 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4046 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4047 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4048 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4049 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4050 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4051 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4052 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4053 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4054 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4055 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4056 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4057 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4058 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4059 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4060 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4062 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4063 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4064 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4066 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4067 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4068 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4069 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4072 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4073 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4077 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4078 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4079 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4080 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4082 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4083 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4084 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4086 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4087 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4088 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4089 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4090 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4093 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4094 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4096 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4097 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4098 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4099 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4101 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4102 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4103 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4105 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4106 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4107 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4108 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4110 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4111 and sticky) with the -m option.
4113 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4114 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4115 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4116 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4117 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4119 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4120 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4122 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4126 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4127 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4128 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4129 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4131 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4133 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4135 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4136 silently ignoring one of them.
4138 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4139 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4140 containing this change was 5.92.
4142 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4143 automatically newline terminated.
4145 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4146 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4147 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4148 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4151 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4152 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4153 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4156 ** Scheduled for removal
4158 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4159 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4161 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4162 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4163 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4164 command to unlink a directory.
4166 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4167 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4168 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4169 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4173 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4174 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4175 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4176 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4177 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4178 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4182 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4183 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4185 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4187 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4188 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4189 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4191 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4192 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4195 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4196 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4198 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4199 list directories before files.
4201 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4202 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4203 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4204 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4207 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4209 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4211 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4212 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4213 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4215 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4216 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4220 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4221 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4222 usually printing nothing.
4224 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4226 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4227 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4228 them with hard-linked directories.
4230 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4231 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4232 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4234 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4235 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4236 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4238 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4241 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4242 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4244 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4245 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4247 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4248 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4250 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4251 all command-line arguments.
4253 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4255 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4257 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4258 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4260 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4262 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4263 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4264 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4265 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4266 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4268 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4269 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4271 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4272 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4273 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4274 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4276 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4278 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4282 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4283 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4285 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4286 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4288 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4289 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4291 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4292 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4294 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4295 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4297 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4299 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4300 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4301 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4304 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4306 ** Build-related bug fixes
4308 installing .mo files would fail
4311 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4315 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4317 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4320 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4324 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4325 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4329 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4331 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4332 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4334 ** Deprecated options
4336 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4337 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4339 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4343 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4345 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4346 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4347 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4348 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4350 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4353 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4359 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4364 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4366 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4368 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4369 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4370 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4372 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4373 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4374 problematic usages. These include:
4376 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4377 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4378 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4379 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4380 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4381 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4382 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4383 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4384 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4386 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4387 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4389 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4390 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4391 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4392 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4394 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4395 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4396 between binary and text files.
4398 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4402 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4406 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4407 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4409 head tac tail tee tr
4410 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4412 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4413 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4415 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4416 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4417 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4419 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4421 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4423 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4424 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4425 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4429 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4431 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4432 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4434 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4435 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4436 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4440 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4441 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4445 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4446 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4447 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4451 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4452 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4456 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4458 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4460 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4464 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4465 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4466 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4468 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4469 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4470 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4471 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4472 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4474 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4478 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4479 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4480 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4482 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4484 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4485 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4486 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4487 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4489 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4491 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4492 rather than silently wrapping around.
4494 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4495 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4497 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4498 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4500 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4501 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4502 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4503 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4505 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4507 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4509 ** Improved robustness
4511 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4512 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4513 no matter how large the result.
4515 ** Improved portability
4517 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4518 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4520 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4522 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4523 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4524 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4526 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4527 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4531 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4532 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4534 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4536 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4537 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4538 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4539 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4541 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4542 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4544 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4545 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4546 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4548 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4550 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4551 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4553 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4554 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4556 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4558 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4559 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4561 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4562 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4564 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4565 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4566 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4568 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4570 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4572 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4576 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4578 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4579 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4580 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4582 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4583 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4585 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4586 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4587 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4589 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4590 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4592 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4593 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4594 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4595 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4597 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4598 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4600 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4601 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4602 the file system does not support it.
4604 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4606 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4607 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4609 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4611 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4612 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4614 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4615 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4616 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4617 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4619 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4620 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4623 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4624 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4625 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4626 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4628 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4629 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4630 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4631 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4633 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4634 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4636 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4638 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4639 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4640 reporting incorrect results.
4644 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4645 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4647 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4650 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4652 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4653 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4655 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4656 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4658 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4661 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4662 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4663 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4664 the file name does not look like a page range.
4666 printf has several changes:
4668 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4669 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4671 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4672 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4673 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4675 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4676 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4679 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4680 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4682 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4683 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4685 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4687 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4688 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4690 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4692 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4694 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4695 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4696 when first encountering the directory.
4700 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4701 output; POSIX requires this.
4703 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4704 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4706 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4708 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4709 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4711 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4712 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4714 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4715 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4716 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4717 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4718 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4719 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4720 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4722 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4723 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4724 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4726 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4727 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4729 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4731 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4733 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4734 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4735 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4736 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4738 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4742 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4743 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4744 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4745 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4746 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4748 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4749 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4750 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4752 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4753 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4755 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4756 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4758 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4759 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4760 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4761 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4762 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4764 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4765 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4767 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4768 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4770 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4772 nocreat do not create the output file
4773 excl fail if the output file already exists
4774 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4775 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4777 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4779 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4780 direct use direct I/O for data
4781 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4782 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4783 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4784 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4785 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4787 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4789 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4790 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4793 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4794 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4795 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4796 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4797 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4798 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4800 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4801 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4803 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4806 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4808 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4810 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4811 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4813 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4814 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4815 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4817 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4818 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4819 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4821 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4823 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4824 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4826 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4827 for compatibility with bash.
4829 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4831 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4832 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4833 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4834 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4836 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4837 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4839 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4840 ls supports TABSIZE.
4841 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4842 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4843 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4845 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4848 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4850 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4851 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4852 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4853 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4854 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4855 an offset, not as a file name.
4857 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4858 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4860 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4861 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4863 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4864 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4866 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4867 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4868 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4870 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4871 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4873 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4874 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4878 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4880 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4882 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4886 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4887 or more arguments between partitions.
4889 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4890 holes in the destination.
4892 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4893 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4894 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4895 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4896 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4897 terminates immediately.
4899 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4901 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4903 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4904 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4905 not the empty string.
4907 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4908 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4912 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4913 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4914 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4917 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4924 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4928 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4929 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4931 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4932 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4934 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4935 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4936 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4939 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4943 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4944 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4946 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4947 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4949 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4950 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4951 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4953 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4955 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4958 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4960 ** Configuration option
4962 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4963 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4967 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4968 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4972 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4973 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4974 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4977 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4978 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4979 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4980 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4981 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4982 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4983 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4986 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4990 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4991 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4992 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4994 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4995 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4997 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4999 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5000 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5001 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5002 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5004 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5006 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5007 not just the ones that reference directories
5009 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5010 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5012 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5013 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5014 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5016 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5017 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5018 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5019 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5020 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5021 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5023 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5028 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5029 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5031 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5033 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5035 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5037 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5038 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5040 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5041 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5043 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5045 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5049 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5051 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5053 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5054 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5055 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5056 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5057 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5059 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5060 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5062 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5063 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5065 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5066 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5068 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5069 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5070 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5074 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5075 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5076 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5077 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5078 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5079 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5080 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5081 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5082 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5083 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5084 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5085 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5086 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5087 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5089 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5091 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5092 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5094 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5096 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5098 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5099 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5101 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5103 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5104 without a trailing newline.
5106 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5107 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5109 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5112 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5116 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5118 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5120 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5121 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5122 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5123 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5125 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5127 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5128 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5129 be printed without leading spaces.
5131 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5132 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5137 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5138 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5139 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5141 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5143 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5144 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5146 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5147 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5149 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5150 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5152 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5154 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5156 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5158 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5159 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5161 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5163 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5165 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5166 byte offsets are specified.
5169 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5172 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5175 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5176 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5177 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5178 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5179 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5180 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5181 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5182 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5183 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5184 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5185 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5186 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5187 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5188 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5189 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5190 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5191 directory where M has write access.
5192 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5193 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5194 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5197 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5198 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5199 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5200 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5201 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5202 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5203 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5204 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5205 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5206 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5207 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5208 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5209 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5210 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5211 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5212 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5213 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5214 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5215 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5216 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5217 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5218 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5219 appeared one additional time.
5221 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5222 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5223 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5224 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5227 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5228 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5229 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5230 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5231 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5232 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5233 if there were more than 338.
5235 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5236 - false --help now exits nonzero
5239 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5240 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5241 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5242 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5245 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5246 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5247 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5248 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5249 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5252 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5253 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5254 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5255 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5256 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5257 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5258 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5261 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5262 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5263 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5264 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5265 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5266 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5268 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5269 under certain unusual conditions
5270 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5271 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5274 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5275 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5276 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5277 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5278 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5279 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5280 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5281 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5282 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5283 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5284 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5285 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5286 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5287 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5288 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5289 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5292 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5293 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5296 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5297 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5298 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5299 involving hard-linked directories
5300 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5301 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5302 character-special and block files
5305 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5306 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5307 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5308 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5309 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5310 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5311 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5312 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5313 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5315 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5316 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5317 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5318 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5319 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5320 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5321 specified on the command line.
5322 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5323 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5324 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5325 the first file untouched.
5326 * readlink: new program
5327 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5328 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5329 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5330 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5331 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5332 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5335 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5336 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5337 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5338 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5339 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5340 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5341 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5342 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5343 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5344 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5345 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5346 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5348 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5349 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5350 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5352 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5353 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5354 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5355 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5356 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5357 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5358 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5359 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5362 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5363 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5366 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5367 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5368 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5369 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5370 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5371 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5372 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5375 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5376 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5378 ========================================================================
5379 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5380 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5383 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5385 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5386 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5387 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5388 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5389 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5390 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5391 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5392 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5393 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5394 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5395 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5396 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5398 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5399 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5400 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5401 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5403 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5406 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5408 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5409 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5410 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5411 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5412 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5413 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5414 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5417 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5418 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5419 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5420 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5421 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5422 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5423 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5424 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5425 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5426 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5427 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5428 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5429 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5430 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5431 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5432 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5434 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5435 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5437 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5438 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5439 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5440 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5441 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5442 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5444 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5445 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5446 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5447 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5448 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5449 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5450 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5452 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5453 the source files in the following example:
5454 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5455 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5456 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5457 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5458 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5459 links between source files with --preserve=links
5460 * cp accepts new options:
5461 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5462 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5463 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5464 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5465 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5466 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5467 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5468 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5469 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5471 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5472 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5473 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5474 even though it's older than dest.
5475 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5476 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5477 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5478 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5479 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5481 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5482 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5483 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5484 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5485 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5486 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5487 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5489 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5490 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5491 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5493 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5494 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5495 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5496 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5497 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5498 This is the default.
5500 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5501 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5502 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5503 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5504 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5506 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5509 ========================================================================
5510 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5511 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5514 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5515 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5517 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5518 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5519 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5520 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5521 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5523 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5524 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5525 that specifies a non-directory
5528 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5529 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5530 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5531 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5532 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5533 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5534 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5535 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5536 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5537 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5538 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5539 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5540 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5541 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5542 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5543 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5544 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5545 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5546 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5547 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5548 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5549 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5550 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5551 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5553 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5554 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5555 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5557 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5559 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5560 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5562 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5563 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5564 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5565 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5566 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5568 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5569 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5570 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5571 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5572 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5574 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5576 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5577 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5578 * still more portability fixes
5579 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5580 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5582 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5584 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5586 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5588 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5589 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5590 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5591 there is any time remaining
5592 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5594 ========================================================================
5595 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5596 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5598 This package began as the union of the following:
5599 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5601 ========================================================================
5603 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5605 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5606 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5607 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5608 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5609 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5610 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.