1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
22 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
23 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
24 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
27 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
28 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
31 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
32 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
34 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
35 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
39 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
43 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
45 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
46 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
49 ** Changes in behavior
51 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
52 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
53 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
55 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
56 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
57 checksum utilities with cksum.
61 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
62 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
63 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
65 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
66 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
69 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
73 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
74 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
75 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
76 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
79 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
80 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
81 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
82 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
84 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
85 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
86 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
88 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
89 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
90 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
93 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
94 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
96 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
97 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
100 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
101 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
102 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
103 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
105 ** Changes in behavior
107 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
108 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
109 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
110 due to -n, -i, or -u.
114 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
115 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
116 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
119 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
123 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
124 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
125 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
126 total line in this case.
127 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
129 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
130 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
133 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
136 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
137 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
138 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
141 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
142 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
143 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
144 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
145 which may have resulted in data corruption.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
148 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
149 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
150 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
152 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
153 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
155 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
156 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
157 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
159 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
160 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
161 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
163 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
164 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
165 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
167 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
168 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
169 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
170 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
171 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
173 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
174 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
175 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
176 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
177 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
179 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
180 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
181 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
183 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
184 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
185 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
187 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
188 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
189 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
192 ** Changes in behavior
194 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
195 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
196 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
197 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
198 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
199 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
201 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
202 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
204 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
205 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
206 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
207 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
209 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
210 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
211 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
213 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
214 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
215 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
216 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
218 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
219 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
220 This behavior is now documented.
222 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
223 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
225 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
226 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
227 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
229 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
230 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
231 from errors from the invoked command.
233 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
234 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
235 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
238 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
242 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
243 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
245 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
246 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
248 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
249 print details on how a file is being copied.
251 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
252 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
254 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
255 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
257 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
258 asked to move a file to a different file system.
260 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
261 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
263 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
264 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
266 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
267 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
271 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
272 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
273 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
274 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
275 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
277 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
278 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
280 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
281 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
283 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
284 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
285 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
287 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
288 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
289 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
291 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
292 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
294 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
295 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
296 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
297 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
300 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
304 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
305 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
308 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
309 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
310 before adjusting it to the correct value.
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
313 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
314 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
317 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
318 and B is in some other file system.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
321 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
322 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
323 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
325 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
328 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
329 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
330 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
331 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
334 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
335 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
338 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
339 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
342 ** Changes in behavior
344 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
345 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
346 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
348 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
349 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
350 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
351 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
353 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
354 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
356 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
357 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
358 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
360 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
361 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
363 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
364 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
365 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
366 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
367 though they still work.
369 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
370 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
371 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
373 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
374 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
376 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
377 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
378 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
380 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
381 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
382 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
383 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
387 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
388 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
390 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
391 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
393 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
394 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
398 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
399 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
401 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
402 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
403 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
406 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
408 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
409 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
410 since synchronizing can take a long time.
412 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
414 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
415 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
417 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
419 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
420 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
421 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
425 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
429 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
433 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
436 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
437 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
438 is a non regular file.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
441 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
442 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
443 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
445 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
448 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
451 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
452 heavily changed during the run.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
455 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
458 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
461 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
464 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
467 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
468 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
469 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
471 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
474 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
475 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
477 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
478 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
481 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
482 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
485 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
486 invalid combinations of case character classes.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
489 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
490 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
493 ** Changes in behavior
495 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
496 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
498 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
499 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
500 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
502 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
503 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
504 that was made in release 8.32.
506 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
507 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
508 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
510 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
511 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
513 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
514 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
518 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
519 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
520 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
521 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
523 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
525 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
526 when verifying tagged format checksums.
528 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
530 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
531 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
533 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
534 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
536 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
537 NUL instead of newline.
539 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
541 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
542 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
543 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
547 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
548 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
550 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
551 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
552 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
554 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
555 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
557 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
558 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
560 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
561 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
563 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
564 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
565 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
567 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
569 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
570 where avx2 instructions are supported.
571 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
574 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
578 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
579 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
580 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
582 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
583 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
584 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
585 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
586 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
588 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
589 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
590 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
591 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
592 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
593 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
595 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
598 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
599 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
600 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
603 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
604 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
605 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
608 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
609 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
611 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
612 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
613 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
614 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
616 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
617 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
620 ** Changes in behavior
622 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
623 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
624 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
625 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
626 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
629 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
630 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
631 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
632 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
633 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
634 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
635 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
636 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
639 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
640 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
641 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
642 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
644 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
645 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
646 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
648 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
649 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
653 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
654 file creation time, where available.
656 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
657 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
659 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
660 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
661 useful on network file systems.
665 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
666 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
668 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
669 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
670 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
674 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
677 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
681 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
684 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
685 after asking the user whether to proceed.
686 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
688 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
689 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
691 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
692 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
693 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
695 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
696 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
697 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
698 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
699 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
700 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
702 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
703 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
705 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
708 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
709 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
712 ** Changes in behavior
714 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
715 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
716 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
717 end-of-options marker.
719 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
722 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
723 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
725 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
726 environment variable is set.
728 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
729 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
730 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
731 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
732 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
734 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
736 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
737 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
738 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
739 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
741 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
742 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
746 id now supports specifying multiple users.
748 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
749 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
751 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
752 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
753 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
754 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
755 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
756 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
758 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
759 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
761 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
762 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
764 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
765 signal handling before executing a program.
769 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
770 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
771 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
775 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
776 which is common in Asian locales.
778 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
779 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
781 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
782 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
785 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
789 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
790 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
791 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
792 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
793 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
794 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
796 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
797 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
798 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
799 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
801 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
802 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
803 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
804 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
805 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
806 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
808 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
809 even if it can't be traversed.
810 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
812 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
813 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
814 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
816 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
817 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
819 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
820 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
821 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
822 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
823 now silently does nothing if A exists.
824 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
826 ** Changes in behavior
828 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
829 it is self referential.
831 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
835 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
837 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
838 each processing step.
840 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
841 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
844 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
845 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
846 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
848 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
849 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
853 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
854 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
856 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
857 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
858 and tail -f uses inotify.
860 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
861 which is especially significant on macOS.
864 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
868 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
869 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
871 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
872 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
873 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
874 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
876 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
879 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
880 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
882 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
883 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
886 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
887 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
889 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
890 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
893 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
894 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
895 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
896 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
901 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
905 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
907 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
908 rather than reading from the start.
910 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
911 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
912 for unknown long options.
916 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
917 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
920 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
924 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
925 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
926 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
927 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
929 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
930 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
931 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
932 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
933 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
935 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
936 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
937 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
938 now fails instead of losing the data.
939 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
941 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
942 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
943 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
945 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
946 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
947 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
949 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
950 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
953 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
954 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
955 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
957 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
958 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
959 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
961 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
962 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
963 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
965 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
966 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
967 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
969 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
970 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
973 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
976 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
977 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
980 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
981 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
983 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
984 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
985 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
986 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
988 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
989 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
990 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
992 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
993 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
996 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
997 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1001 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1002 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1003 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1005 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1006 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1008 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1009 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1011 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1012 executing the subsidiary program.
1014 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1016 ** Changes in behavior
1018 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1019 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1020 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1021 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1025 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1027 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1028 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1030 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1031 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1032 is effective in this case.
1035 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1039 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1040 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1041 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1043 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1044 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1045 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1047 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1048 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1049 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1051 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1052 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1053 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1055 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1056 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1057 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1059 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1060 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1061 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1062 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1063 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1065 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1066 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1067 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1072 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1073 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1074 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1075 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1077 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1078 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1079 time zone is indeterminate.
1081 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1082 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1083 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1084 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1086 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1087 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1088 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1090 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1091 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1093 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1094 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1095 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1099 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1100 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1101 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1104 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1108 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1109 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1112 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1113 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1114 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1116 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1117 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1118 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1119 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1120 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1122 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1123 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1124 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1126 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1127 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1129 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1130 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1133 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1134 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1135 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1137 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1140 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1141 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1142 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1144 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1145 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1147 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1148 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1149 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1151 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1153 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1154 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1156 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1157 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1159 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1160 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1162 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1165 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1166 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1167 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1168 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1170 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1171 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1172 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1174 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1175 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1176 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1178 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1179 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1182 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1183 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1184 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1186 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1189 ** Changes in behavior
1191 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1193 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1194 values for any argument.
1196 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1197 they are out of localtime range.
1199 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1200 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1201 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1202 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1206 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1207 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1208 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1210 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1211 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1213 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1214 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1216 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1218 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1219 written to a terminal.
1221 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1222 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1224 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1225 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1226 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1227 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1228 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1229 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1230 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1231 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1232 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1233 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1234 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1236 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1237 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1241 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1242 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1246 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1248 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1249 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1251 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1254 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1258 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1259 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1260 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1261 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1263 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1264 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1266 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1267 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1270 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1273 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1274 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1277 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1280 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1281 that specify an offset for the first field.
1282 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1284 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1285 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1289 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1290 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1294 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1295 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1297 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1298 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1299 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1300 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1301 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1303 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1304 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1305 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1307 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1308 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1309 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1311 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1312 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1314 ** Changes in behavior
1316 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1317 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1319 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1320 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1322 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1323 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1325 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1326 when outputting to a terminal.
1328 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1332 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1333 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1335 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1336 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1338 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1339 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1340 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1342 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1343 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1345 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1346 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1347 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1349 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1351 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1352 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1353 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1355 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1356 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1363 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1364 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1366 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1369 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1370 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1373 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1374 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1375 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1376 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1378 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1379 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1380 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1381 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1383 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1384 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1386 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1387 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1389 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1390 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1391 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1393 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1394 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1395 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1397 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1398 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1399 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1401 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1402 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1403 character at the 4GiB position.
1404 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1406 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1407 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1409 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1410 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1412 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1413 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1416 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1417 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1419 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1420 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1421 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1423 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1424 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1426 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1427 when those files are being created or renamed.
1428 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1432 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1433 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1434 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1435 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1437 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1438 on stderr approximately every second.
1440 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1441 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1443 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1444 other than the default newline character.
1446 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1447 a useful setting with high latency links.
1449 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1450 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1452 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1453 and output errors in general.
1455 ** Changes in behavior
1457 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1458 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1459 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1460 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1462 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1463 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1464 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1465 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1466 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1468 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1469 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1471 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1473 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1474 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1476 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1477 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1481 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1482 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1484 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1485 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1487 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1488 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1490 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1491 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1493 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1495 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1496 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1497 documentation are provided.
1500 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1504 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1505 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1507 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1508 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1509 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1510 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1512 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1513 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1514 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1515 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1517 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1518 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1520 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1521 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1523 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1524 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1525 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1526 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1527 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1528 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1529 values are in octal.
1542 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1544 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1545 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1546 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1547 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1548 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1549 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1551 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1552 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1553 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1554 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1556 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1557 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1558 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1560 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1561 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1562 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1563 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1565 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1566 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1567 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1569 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1570 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1571 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1573 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1574 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1575 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1576 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1579 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1580 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1581 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1583 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1584 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1586 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1587 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1588 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1590 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1591 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1593 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1594 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1596 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1597 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1599 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1600 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1602 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1603 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1604 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1606 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1607 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1611 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1612 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1614 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1615 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1616 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1617 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1618 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1619 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1620 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1621 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1622 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1623 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1624 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1625 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1626 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1627 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1628 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1629 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1630 it suitable for embedded system.
1632 ** Changes in behavior
1634 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1635 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1637 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1638 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1640 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1641 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1642 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1644 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1645 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1646 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1650 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1651 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1652 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1654 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1656 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1657 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1658 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1660 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1661 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1662 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1663 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1665 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1666 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1668 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1669 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1670 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1673 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1677 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1678 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1679 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1681 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1682 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1683 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1684 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1686 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1687 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1688 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1690 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1691 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1693 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1695 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1696 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1697 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1699 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1700 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1701 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1703 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1704 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1705 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1706 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1708 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1709 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1710 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1712 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1713 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1714 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1716 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1717 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1719 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1720 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1721 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1722 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1724 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1725 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1726 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1728 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1729 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1730 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1734 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1735 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1736 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1738 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1739 used to identify the split points.
1741 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1742 command line argument through to the output.
1744 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1747 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1748 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1750 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1751 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1753 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1755 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1756 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1757 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1759 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1760 unique groups with empty lines.
1762 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1763 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1765 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1768 ** Changes in behavior
1770 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1771 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1772 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1773 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1775 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1776 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1778 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1779 not just the transfer counts.
1781 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1783 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1784 as per the documented interface.
1788 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1790 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1791 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1792 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1793 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1795 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1796 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1797 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1798 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1800 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1801 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1802 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1804 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1805 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1807 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1808 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1810 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1814 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1821 numfmt: reformat numbers
1825 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1826 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1827 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1829 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1830 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1831 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1833 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1834 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1838 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1839 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1841 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1842 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1843 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1845 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1846 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1847 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1849 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1850 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1851 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1853 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1854 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1855 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1857 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1858 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1859 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1861 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1862 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1864 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1865 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1867 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1868 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1869 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1871 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1872 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1873 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1875 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1876 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1877 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1879 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1880 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1881 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1882 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1884 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1885 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1886 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1888 ** Changes in behavior
1890 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1891 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1892 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1893 'total' in the target column.
1895 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1896 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1897 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1899 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1900 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1902 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1903 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1907 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1908 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1910 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1911 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1913 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1917 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1918 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1919 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1920 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1921 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1922 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1923 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1924 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1925 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1926 for a patched distribution package.
1928 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1929 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1931 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1932 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1933 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1934 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1937 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1941 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1943 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1944 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1945 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1949 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1950 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1951 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1952 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1953 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1955 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1956 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1958 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1959 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1960 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1961 eventually exits nonzero.
1963 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1964 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1965 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1966 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1967 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1969 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1970 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1971 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1973 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1974 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1977 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1978 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1979 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1981 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1982 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1983 Before, this would infloop:
1984 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1985 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1987 ** Changes in behavior
1989 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1993 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1994 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1995 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1996 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1997 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2000 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2001 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2002 format-changing options.
2004 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2005 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2006 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2007 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2008 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2012 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2013 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2014 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2015 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2016 are run without following the instructions in README.
2018 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2019 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2020 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2021 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2022 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2023 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2024 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2027 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2031 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2032 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2033 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2034 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2036 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2037 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2038 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2039 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2041 sort -u could read freed memory.
2042 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2043 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2044 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2048 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2049 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2050 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2051 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2054 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2058 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2059 processes will not intersperse their output.
2060 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2062 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2063 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2064 date: invalid date '\260'
2065 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2067 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2068 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2069 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2070 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2072 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2073 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2074 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2076 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2077 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2078 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2079 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2080 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2081 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2083 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2086 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2087 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2089 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2090 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2091 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2093 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2094 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2095 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2099 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2101 ** Changes in behavior
2103 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2104 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2105 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2106 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2107 have any reason to include it here.
2111 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2112 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2113 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2115 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2116 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2117 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2120 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2124 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2125 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2126 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2127 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2128 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2129 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2131 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2132 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2133 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2134 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2135 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2136 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2137 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2139 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2140 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2142 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2143 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2147 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2148 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2150 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2152 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2154 ** Changes in behavior
2156 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2157 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2158 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2160 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2161 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2164 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2168 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2169 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2170 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2171 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2172 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2173 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2174 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2175 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2177 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2178 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2179 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2180 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2181 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2183 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2184 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2186 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2187 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2189 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2190 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2192 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2193 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2195 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2196 additional static suffix to output file names.
2198 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2199 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2200 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2202 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2203 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2207 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2208 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2209 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2211 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2212 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2213 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2214 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2215 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2216 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2218 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2219 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2220 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2221 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2222 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2224 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2225 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2226 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2227 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2231 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2232 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2233 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2235 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2236 instead of causing a usage failure.
2238 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2241 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2245 realpath: print resolved file names.
2249 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2250 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2252 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2255 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2256 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2257 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2258 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2259 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2260 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2262 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2263 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2264 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2266 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2267 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2270 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2271 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2272 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2273 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2274 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2276 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2278 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2279 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2281 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2282 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2283 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2285 ** Changes in behavior
2287 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2288 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2289 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2290 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2291 usually-short referent instead.
2293 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2294 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2295 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2296 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2299 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2303 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2304 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2305 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2307 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2308 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2310 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2315 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2316 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2318 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2319 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2320 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2321 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2323 ** Changes in behavior
2325 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2326 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2327 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2331 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2332 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2333 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2336 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2340 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2341 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2342 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2344 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2345 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2347 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2348 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2349 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2350 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2351 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2353 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2354 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2355 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2356 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2357 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2358 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2359 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2360 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2362 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2363 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2365 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2366 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2368 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2371 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2372 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2373 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2375 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2376 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2377 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2378 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2380 ** Changes in behavior
2382 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2383 when -v or -c specified.
2385 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2386 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2390 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2391 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2392 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2393 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2394 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2396 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2397 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2398 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2400 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2401 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2402 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2403 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2404 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2405 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2406 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2408 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2409 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2410 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2414 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2415 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2417 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2420 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2421 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2423 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2424 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2426 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2427 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2429 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2431 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2435 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2436 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2438 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2441 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2445 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2446 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2448 ** Changes in behavior
2450 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2451 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2452 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2453 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2454 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2455 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2456 resolved for 2.6.39.
2457 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2458 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2459 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2463 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2470 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2471 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2474 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2475 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2476 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2478 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2479 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2480 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2482 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2485 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2486 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2488 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2489 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2491 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2492 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2496 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2497 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2498 processed portion thereof.
2500 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2501 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2503 ** Changes in behavior
2505 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2506 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2507 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2509 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2510 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2511 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2513 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2514 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2516 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2517 Use --preserve-context instead.
2519 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2522 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2526 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2527 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2528 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2529 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2530 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2532 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2533 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2535 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2536 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2537 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2539 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2540 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2542 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2547 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2548 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2549 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2550 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2551 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2552 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2553 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2554 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2556 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2557 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2558 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2560 ** Changes in behavior
2562 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2563 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2564 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2567 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2571 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2572 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2573 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2576 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2580 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2581 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2583 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2584 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2586 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2587 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2589 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2590 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2591 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2594 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2595 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2597 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2598 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2599 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2601 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2603 ** Changes in behavior
2605 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2606 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2607 to the number of available processors.
2611 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2612 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2613 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2616 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2620 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2621 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2622 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2623 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2625 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2626 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2627 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2629 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2630 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2632 ** Changes in behavior
2634 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2635 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2637 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2638 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2639 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2640 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2641 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2642 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2644 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2645 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2646 the same way as the others.
2648 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2649 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2652 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2656 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2657 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2658 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2660 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2661 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2663 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2664 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2665 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2667 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2668 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2670 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2671 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2673 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2674 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2675 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2677 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2678 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2679 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2680 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2684 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2685 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2687 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2690 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2691 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2693 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2695 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2696 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2697 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2699 ** Changes in behavior
2701 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2702 rather than its aliased target.
2704 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2705 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2706 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2708 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2709 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2710 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2711 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2712 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2713 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2714 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2715 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2717 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2719 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2721 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2722 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2725 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2726 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2727 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2728 control like taskset for example.
2730 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2732 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2733 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2734 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2735 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2736 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2737 includes %C when context information is available.
2739 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2740 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2741 rather than a file system attribute.
2743 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2744 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2745 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2746 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2748 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2749 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2750 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2752 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2753 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2754 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2757 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2761 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2762 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2764 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2766 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2767 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2769 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2770 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2771 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2772 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2774 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2775 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2776 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2780 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2781 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2783 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2784 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2785 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2787 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2788 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2789 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2790 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2791 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2792 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2793 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2794 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2795 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2797 ** Changes in behavior
2799 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2800 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2802 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2803 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2806 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2810 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2811 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2812 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2817 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2818 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2820 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2821 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2822 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2823 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2825 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2826 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2827 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2830 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2834 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2835 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2836 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2838 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2839 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2840 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2842 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2843 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2845 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2846 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2847 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2848 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2850 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2851 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2852 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2854 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2855 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2856 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2857 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2859 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2860 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2861 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2863 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2864 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2865 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2866 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2868 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2869 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2870 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2872 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2873 processes will not intersperse their output.
2874 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2877 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2881 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2882 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2884 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2885 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2887 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2888 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2889 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2890 the presence of the empty string argument.
2891 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2893 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2894 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2895 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2896 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2898 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2899 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2901 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2902 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2903 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2905 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2906 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2907 and with a malicious user on the same system
2908 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2909 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2912 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2916 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2917 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2918 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2920 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2921 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2922 offending directory and all "contents."
2924 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2925 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2926 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2928 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2929 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2930 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2932 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2933 processes will not intersperse their output.
2934 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2935 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2937 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2938 output the name of the file to stdout.
2939 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2941 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2942 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2943 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2945 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2946 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2949 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2950 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2951 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2953 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2954 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2955 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2956 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2957 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2958 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2960 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2961 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2962 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2963 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2965 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2966 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2968 ** Changes in behavior
2970 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2971 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2972 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2973 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2974 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2976 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2977 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2978 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2979 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2981 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2983 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2984 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2985 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2986 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2987 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2991 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2995 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2996 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2998 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2999 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3001 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3002 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3003 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3005 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3006 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3009 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3013 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3014 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3015 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3017 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3018 to accommodate leap seconds.
3019 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3021 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3022 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3023 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3025 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3027 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3028 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3029 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3031 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3032 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3033 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3034 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3035 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3039 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3040 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3041 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3042 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3044 ** Changes in behavior
3046 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3047 environment variable is set.
3049 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3050 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3051 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3055 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3056 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3057 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3058 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3060 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3061 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3062 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3063 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3067 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3068 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3069 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3071 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3072 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3073 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3074 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3075 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3076 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3077 another improvement:
3079 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3080 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3083 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3087 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3088 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3089 and libraries tested at configure time.
3090 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3092 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3093 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3095 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3096 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3098 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3099 printing a summary to stderr.
3100 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3102 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3103 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3104 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3106 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3107 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3109 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3110 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3111 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3112 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3114 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3115 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3116 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3117 which is relatively unusual.
3118 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3120 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3121 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3122 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3123 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3124 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3125 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3126 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3130 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3131 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3132 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3133 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3134 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3138 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3139 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3141 ** Changes in behavior
3143 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3144 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3145 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3146 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3147 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3150 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3154 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3155 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3157 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3158 before data copying has started.
3160 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3161 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3163 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3164 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3165 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3166 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3168 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3169 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3170 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3171 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3173 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3178 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3179 for its standard streams.
3181 ** Changes in behavior
3183 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3184 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3185 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3186 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3187 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3188 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3190 ** Deprecated options
3192 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3193 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3197 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3199 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3200 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3201 a btrfs file system.
3203 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3205 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3206 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3208 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3209 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3212 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3216 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3217 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3218 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3219 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3221 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3222 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3223 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3224 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3225 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3230 make check: two tests have been corrected
3234 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3235 inherited from gnulib.
3238 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3242 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3243 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3244 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3245 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3247 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3248 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3250 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3252 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3253 systems without xattr support.
3255 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3256 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3257 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3259 ** Changes in behavior
3261 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3262 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3263 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3264 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3266 ** Improved robustness
3268 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3269 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3270 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3271 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3272 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3273 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3274 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3275 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3276 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3280 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3281 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3283 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3284 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3285 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3286 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3287 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3290 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3294 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3295 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3296 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3300 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3301 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3302 data was read, or on process exit.
3303 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3305 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3306 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3307 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3310 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3311 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3312 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3313 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3315 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3316 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3318 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3319 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3321 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3322 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3323 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3325 ** Changes in behavior
3327 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3328 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3329 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3331 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3332 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3334 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3335 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3336 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3339 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3343 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3345 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3346 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3347 install: Never copies xattrs
3349 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3350 from overwriting any existing destination file
3352 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3353 mode where this feature is available.
3355 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3356 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3357 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3358 do not modify the destination at all.
3360 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3362 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3366 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3367 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3369 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3371 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3372 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3374 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3375 processing the first file name
3377 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3378 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3379 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3380 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3382 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3383 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3385 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3386 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3389 ** Changes in behavior
3391 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3392 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3394 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3395 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3396 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3398 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3399 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3401 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3403 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3404 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3405 is still marked with a '+'.
3408 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3412 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3413 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3417 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3418 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3419 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3420 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3421 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3422 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3424 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3425 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3427 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3428 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3430 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3432 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3433 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3434 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3436 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3437 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3439 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3440 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3441 used to factor large numbers.
3443 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3446 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3448 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3450 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3451 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3453 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3454 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3455 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3456 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3458 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3459 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3460 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3462 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3463 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3467 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3469 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3470 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3472 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3473 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3475 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3477 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3478 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3482 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3483 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3484 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3486 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3488 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3489 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3490 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3492 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3493 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3494 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3496 ** Changes in behavior
3498 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3499 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3502 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3506 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3507 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3508 'futimens' system calls.
3512 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3514 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3515 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3516 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3518 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3519 with no USERNAME argument.
3521 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3522 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3523 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3525 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3526 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3527 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3528 number of fields for some inputs.
3530 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3531 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3533 ** Changes in behavior
3535 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3536 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3539 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3543 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3545 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3546 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3547 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3548 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3550 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3551 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3553 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3554 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3556 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3557 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3559 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3560 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3561 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3562 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3564 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3565 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3566 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3567 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3568 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3569 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3571 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3572 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3574 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3575 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3576 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3578 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3579 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3581 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3582 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3584 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3585 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3586 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3587 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3589 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3590 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3592 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3593 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3595 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3596 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3597 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3601 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3602 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3604 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3605 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3606 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3607 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3611 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3612 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3614 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3616 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3620 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3621 which have negative errno values.
3625 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3629 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3633 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3634 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3637 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3641 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3642 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3643 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3645 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3646 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3647 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3648 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3652 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3653 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3654 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3655 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3658 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3662 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3664 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3665 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3666 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3669 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3673 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3674 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3676 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3678 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3680 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3682 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3686 ** Changes in behavior
3688 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3689 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3691 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3692 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3694 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3695 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3696 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3700 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3701 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3702 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3703 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3704 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3705 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3706 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3707 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3708 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3709 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3710 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3712 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3713 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3714 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3717 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3720 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3721 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3722 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3724 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3725 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3726 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3729 ** New build options
3731 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3732 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3733 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3734 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3736 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3737 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3738 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3739 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3740 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3741 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3742 of "make check" fail.
3744 ** Remove deprecated options
3746 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3747 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3748 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3749 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3750 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3752 ** Improved robustness
3754 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3755 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3756 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3757 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3758 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3759 loss of the contents of a/f.
3761 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3762 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3766 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3767 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3768 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3770 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3771 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3772 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3773 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3775 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3776 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3777 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3778 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3779 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3780 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3781 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3782 destination is a symlink.
3784 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3786 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3787 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3789 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3790 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3792 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3794 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3795 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3797 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3798 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3800 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3803 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3804 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3806 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3807 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3809 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3810 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3811 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3812 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3814 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3815 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3816 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3818 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3819 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3820 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3822 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3823 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3824 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3825 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3827 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3828 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3829 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3831 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3832 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3834 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3835 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3837 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3839 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3840 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3841 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3843 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3844 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3846 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3847 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3849 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3850 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3852 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3853 [present in the original version]
3856 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3860 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3862 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3863 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3864 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3866 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3867 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3869 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3873 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3874 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3876 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3877 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3879 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3880 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3882 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3883 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3884 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3885 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3886 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3887 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3889 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3890 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3893 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3894 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3896 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3899 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3900 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3901 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3903 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3904 directory is unreadable.
3906 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3907 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3908 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3910 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3911 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3912 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3913 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3914 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3917 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3918 Before it would print nothing.
3920 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3922 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3923 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3924 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3925 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3926 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3927 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3928 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3929 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3931 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3935 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3936 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3937 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3939 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3940 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3941 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3942 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3945 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3949 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3950 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3951 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3952 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3953 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3954 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3955 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3957 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3958 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3959 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3960 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3961 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3962 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3963 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3964 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3966 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3967 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3968 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3971 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3975 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3976 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3978 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3979 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3980 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3982 ** Improved robustness
3984 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3985 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3986 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3989 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3993 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3994 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3995 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3996 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3997 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3999 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4003 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4006 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4010 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4011 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4012 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4013 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4015 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4016 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4018 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4019 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4020 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4023 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4025 ** Improved robustness
4027 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4028 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4030 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4031 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4032 or NFS-mounted partition.
4034 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4035 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4039 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4040 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4041 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4042 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4043 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4044 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4046 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4047 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4049 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4050 or neglect to report file removal.
4052 For the "groups" command:
4054 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4055 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4057 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4059 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4061 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4065 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4066 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4069 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4071 ** Changes in behavior
4073 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4074 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4075 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4076 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4078 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4079 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4080 a final './' or '../' component.
4082 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4083 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4084 this only for pipes.
4086 ** Infrastructure changes
4088 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4089 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4090 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4091 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4095 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4096 name is "." or "..".
4098 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4099 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4100 dirent.d_type support.
4102 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4103 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4105 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4106 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4107 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4108 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4111 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4113 ** Changes in behavior
4115 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4119 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4120 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4124 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4125 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4126 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4128 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4129 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4131 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4132 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4134 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4136 ** Improved robustness
4138 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4139 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4140 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4142 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4143 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4146 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4147 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4149 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4150 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4152 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4153 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4155 ** Changes in behavior
4157 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4158 where the two are distinct.
4160 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4161 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4162 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4163 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4164 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4165 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4166 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4167 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4168 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4169 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4170 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4171 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4172 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4173 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4174 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4175 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4176 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4178 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4179 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4180 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4182 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4183 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4184 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4185 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4188 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4189 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4193 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4194 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4195 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4196 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4198 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4199 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4200 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4202 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4203 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4204 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4205 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4206 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4209 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4210 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4212 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4213 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4214 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4215 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4217 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4218 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4219 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4221 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4222 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4223 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4224 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4226 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4227 and sticky) with the -m option.
4229 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4230 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4231 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4232 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4233 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4235 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4236 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4238 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4242 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4243 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4244 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4245 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4247 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4249 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4251 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4252 silently ignoring one of them.
4254 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4255 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4256 containing this change was 5.92.
4258 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4259 automatically newline terminated.
4261 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4262 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4263 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4264 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4267 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4268 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4269 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4272 ** Scheduled for removal
4274 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4275 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4277 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4278 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4279 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4280 command to unlink a directory.
4282 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4283 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4284 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4285 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4289 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4290 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4291 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4292 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4293 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4294 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4298 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4299 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4301 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4303 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4304 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4305 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4307 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4308 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4311 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4312 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4314 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4315 list directories before files.
4317 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4318 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4319 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4320 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4323 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4325 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4327 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4328 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4329 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4331 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4332 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4336 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4337 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4338 usually printing nothing.
4340 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4342 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4343 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4344 them with hard-linked directories.
4346 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4347 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4348 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4350 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4351 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4352 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4354 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4357 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4358 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4360 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4361 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4363 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4364 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4366 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4367 all command-line arguments.
4369 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4371 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4373 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4374 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4376 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4378 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4379 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4380 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4381 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4382 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4384 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4385 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4387 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4388 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4389 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4390 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4392 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4394 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4398 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4399 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4401 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4402 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4404 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4405 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4407 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4408 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4410 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4411 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4413 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4415 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4416 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4417 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4420 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4422 ** Build-related bug fixes
4424 installing .mo files would fail
4427 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4431 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4433 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4436 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4440 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4441 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4445 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4447 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4448 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4450 ** Deprecated options
4452 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4453 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4455 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4459 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4461 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4462 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4463 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4464 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4466 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4469 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4475 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4480 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4482 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4484 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4485 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4486 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4488 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4489 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4490 problematic usages. These include:
4492 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4493 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4494 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4495 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4496 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4497 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4498 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4499 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4500 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4502 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4503 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4505 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4506 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4507 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4508 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4510 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4511 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4512 between binary and text files.
4514 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4518 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4522 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4523 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4525 head tac tail tee tr
4526 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4528 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4529 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4531 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4532 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4533 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4535 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4537 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4539 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4540 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4541 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4545 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4547 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4548 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4550 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4551 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4552 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4556 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4557 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4561 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4562 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4563 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4567 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4568 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4572 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4574 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4576 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4580 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4581 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4582 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4584 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4585 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4586 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4587 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4588 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4590 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4594 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4595 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4596 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4598 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4600 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4601 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4602 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4603 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4605 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4607 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4608 rather than silently wrapping around.
4610 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4611 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4613 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4614 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4616 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4617 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4618 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4619 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4621 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4623 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4625 ** Improved robustness
4627 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4628 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4629 no matter how large the result.
4631 ** Improved portability
4633 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4634 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4636 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4638 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4639 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4640 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4642 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4643 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4647 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4648 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4650 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4652 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4653 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4654 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4655 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4657 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4658 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4660 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4661 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4662 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4664 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4666 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4667 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4669 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4670 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4672 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4674 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4675 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4677 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4678 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4680 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4681 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4682 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4684 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4686 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4688 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4692 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4694 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4695 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4696 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4698 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4699 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4701 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4702 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4703 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4705 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4706 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4708 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4709 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4710 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4711 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4713 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4714 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4716 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4717 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4718 the file system does not support it.
4720 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4722 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4723 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4725 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4727 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4728 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4730 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4731 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4732 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4733 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4735 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4736 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4739 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4740 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4741 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4742 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4744 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4745 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4746 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4747 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4749 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4750 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4752 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4754 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4755 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4756 reporting incorrect results.
4760 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4761 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4763 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4766 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4768 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4769 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4771 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4772 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4774 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4777 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4778 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4779 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4780 the file name does not look like a page range.
4782 printf has several changes:
4784 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4785 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4787 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4788 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4789 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4791 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4792 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4795 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4796 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4798 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4799 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4801 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4803 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4804 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4806 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4808 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4810 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4811 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4812 when first encountering the directory.
4816 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4817 output; POSIX requires this.
4819 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4820 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4822 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4824 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4825 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4827 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4828 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4830 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4831 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4832 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4833 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4834 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4835 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4836 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4838 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4839 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4840 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4842 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4843 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4845 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4847 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4849 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4850 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4851 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4852 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4854 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4858 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4859 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4860 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4861 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4862 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4864 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4865 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4866 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4868 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4869 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4871 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4872 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4874 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4875 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4876 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4877 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4878 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4880 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4881 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4883 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4884 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4886 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4888 nocreat do not create the output file
4889 excl fail if the output file already exists
4890 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4891 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4893 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4895 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4896 direct use direct I/O for data
4897 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4898 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4899 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4900 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4901 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4903 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4905 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4906 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4909 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4910 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4911 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4912 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4913 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4914 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4916 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4917 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4919 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4922 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4924 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4926 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4927 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4929 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4930 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4931 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4933 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4934 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4935 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4937 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4939 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4940 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4942 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4943 for compatibility with bash.
4945 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4947 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4948 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4949 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4950 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4952 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4953 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4955 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4956 ls supports TABSIZE.
4957 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4958 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4959 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4961 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4964 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4966 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4967 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4968 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4969 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4970 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4971 an offset, not as a file name.
4973 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4974 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4976 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4977 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4979 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4980 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4982 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4983 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4984 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4986 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4987 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4989 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4990 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4994 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4996 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4998 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5002 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5003 or more arguments between partitions.
5005 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5006 holes in the destination.
5008 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5009 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5010 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5011 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5012 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5013 terminates immediately.
5015 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5017 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5019 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5020 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5021 not the empty string.
5023 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5024 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5028 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5029 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5030 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5033 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5040 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5044 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5045 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5047 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5048 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5050 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5051 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5052 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5055 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5059 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5060 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5062 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5063 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5065 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5066 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5067 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5069 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5071 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5074 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5076 ** Configuration option
5078 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5079 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5083 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5084 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5088 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5089 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5090 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5093 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5094 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5095 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5096 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5097 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5098 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5099 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5102 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5106 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5107 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5108 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5110 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5111 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5113 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5115 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5116 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5117 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5118 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5120 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5122 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5123 not just the ones that reference directories
5125 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5126 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5128 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5129 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5130 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5132 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5133 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5134 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5135 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5136 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5137 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5139 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5144 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5145 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5147 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5149 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5151 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5153 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5154 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5156 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5157 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5159 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5161 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5165 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5167 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5169 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5170 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5171 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5172 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5173 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5175 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5176 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5178 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5179 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5181 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5182 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5184 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5185 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5186 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5190 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5191 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5192 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5193 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5194 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5195 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5196 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5197 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5198 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5199 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5200 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5201 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5202 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5203 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5205 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5207 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5208 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5210 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5212 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5214 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5215 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5217 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5219 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5220 without a trailing newline.
5222 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5223 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5225 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5228 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5232 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5234 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5236 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5237 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5238 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5239 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5241 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5243 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5244 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5245 be printed without leading spaces.
5247 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5248 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5253 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5254 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5255 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5257 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5259 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5260 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5262 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5263 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5265 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5266 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5268 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5270 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5272 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5274 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5275 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5277 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5279 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5281 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5282 byte offsets are specified.
5285 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5288 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5291 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5292 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5293 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5294 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5295 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5296 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5297 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5298 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5299 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5300 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5301 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5302 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5303 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5304 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5305 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5306 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5307 directory where M has write access.
5308 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5309 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5310 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5313 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5314 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5315 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5316 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5317 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5318 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5319 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5320 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5321 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5322 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5323 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5324 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5325 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5326 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5327 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5328 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5329 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5330 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5331 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5332 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5333 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5334 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5335 appeared one additional time.
5337 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5338 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5339 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5340 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5343 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5344 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5345 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5346 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5347 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5348 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5349 if there were more than 338.
5351 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5352 - false --help now exits nonzero
5355 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5356 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5357 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5358 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5361 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5362 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5363 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5364 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5365 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5368 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5369 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5370 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5371 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5372 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5373 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5374 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5377 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5378 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5379 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5380 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5381 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5382 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5384 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5385 under certain unusual conditions
5386 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5387 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5390 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5391 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5392 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5393 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5394 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5395 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5396 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5397 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5398 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5399 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5400 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5401 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5402 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5403 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5404 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5405 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5408 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5409 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5412 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5413 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5414 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5415 involving hard-linked directories
5416 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5417 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5418 character-special and block files
5421 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5422 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5423 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5424 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5425 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5426 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5427 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5428 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5429 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5431 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5432 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5433 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5434 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5435 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5436 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5437 specified on the command line.
5438 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5439 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5440 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5441 the first file untouched.
5442 * readlink: new program
5443 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5444 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5445 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5446 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5447 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5448 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5451 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5452 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5453 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5454 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5455 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5456 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5457 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5458 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5459 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5460 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5461 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5462 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5464 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5465 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5466 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5468 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5469 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5470 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5471 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5472 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5473 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5474 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5475 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5478 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5479 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5482 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5483 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5484 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5485 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5486 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5487 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5488 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5491 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5492 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5494 ========================================================================
5495 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5496 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5499 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5501 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5502 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5503 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5504 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5505 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5506 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5507 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5508 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5509 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5510 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5511 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5512 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5514 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5515 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5516 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5517 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5519 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5522 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5524 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5525 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5526 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5527 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5528 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5529 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5530 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5533 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5534 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5535 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5536 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5537 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5538 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5539 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5540 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5541 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5542 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5543 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5544 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5545 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5546 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5547 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5548 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5550 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5551 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5553 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5554 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5555 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5556 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5557 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5558 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5560 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5561 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5562 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5563 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5564 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5565 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5566 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5568 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5569 the source files in the following example:
5570 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5571 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5572 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5573 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5574 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5575 links between source files with --preserve=links
5576 * cp accepts new options:
5577 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5578 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5579 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5580 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5581 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5582 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5583 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5584 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5585 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5587 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5588 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5589 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5590 even though it's older than dest.
5591 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5592 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5593 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5594 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5595 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5597 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5598 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5599 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5600 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5601 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5602 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5603 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5605 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5606 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5607 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5609 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5610 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5611 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5612 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5613 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5614 This is the default.
5616 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5617 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5618 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5619 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5620 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5622 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5625 ========================================================================
5626 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5627 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5630 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5631 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5633 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5634 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5635 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5636 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5637 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5639 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5640 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5641 that specifies a non-directory
5644 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5645 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5646 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5647 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5648 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5649 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5650 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5651 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5652 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5653 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5654 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5655 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5656 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5657 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5658 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5659 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5660 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5661 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5662 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5663 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5664 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5665 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5666 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5667 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5669 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5670 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5671 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5673 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5675 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5676 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5678 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5679 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5680 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5681 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5682 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5684 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5685 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5686 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5687 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5688 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5690 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5692 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5693 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5694 * still more portability fixes
5695 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5696 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5698 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5700 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5702 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5704 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5705 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5706 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5707 there is any time remaining
5708 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5710 ========================================================================
5711 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5712 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5714 This package began as the union of the following:
5715 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5717 ========================================================================
5719 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5721 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5722 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5723 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5724 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5725 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5726 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.