1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp fixes support for --update=none-fail, which would have been
8 rejected as an invalid option.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]
11 ls and printf fix shell quoted output in the edge case of escaped
12 first and last characters, and single quotes in the string.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
15 mv works again with macFUSE file systems. Previously it would
16 have exited with a "Function not implemented" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
19 'tail -c 4096 /dev/zero' no longer loops forever.
20 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
22 ** Changes in behavior
24 ls's -f option now simply acts like -aU, instead of also ignoring
25 some earlier options. For example 'ls -fl' and 'ls -lf' are now
26 equivalent because -f no longer ignores an earlier -l. The new
27 behavior is more orthogonal and is compatible with FreeBSD.
31 sort operates more efficiently when used on pseudo files with
32 an apparent size of 0, like those in /proc.
35 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]
39 chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file
40 with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.
41 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
43 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
44 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
45 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
47 cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits
48 for created directories. Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,
49 cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
52 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
53 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
54 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
55 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
57 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
58 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
60 mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
61 Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
62 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
64 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
65 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
66 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
69 split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
70 no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
71 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
73 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
74 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
75 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
77 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
78 processes after a failed process fork.
79 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
81 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
82 kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
83 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
85 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
86 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
88 ** Changes in behavior
90 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
91 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
93 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
94 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
96 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
97 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
99 cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
100 existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert
101 to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.
103 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
104 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
106 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
107 and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
109 pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
110 rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.
112 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
113 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
117 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
118 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
120 chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
121 more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of
122 CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.
124 cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
125 and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.
127 cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
128 to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
129 and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
130 The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.
132 env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument
133 of the command being executed.
135 mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and
136 destination to be exchanged. It should be combined with
137 --no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.
138 The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single
139 file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet
140 supported in other situations.
142 od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
143 or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.
145 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
149 cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
150 This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
151 throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.
153 env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
154 supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.
156 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
157 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
159 sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
160 This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.
162 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
166 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
170 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
171 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
172 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
174 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
175 presented with malformed checksum lines.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
178 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
179 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
182 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
183 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
186 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
189 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
190 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
191 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
194 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
195 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
198 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
199 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
201 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
202 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
203 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
205 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
206 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
207 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
209 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
210 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
211 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
214 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
215 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
217 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
218 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
221 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
222 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
223 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
225 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
226 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
227 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
229 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
230 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
231 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
233 ** Changes in behavior
235 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
236 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
237 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
239 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
240 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
241 checksum utilities with cksum.
243 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
244 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
245 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
246 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
247 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
248 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
252 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
253 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
254 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
256 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
257 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
259 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
260 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
262 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
264 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
266 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
267 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
269 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
270 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
273 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
274 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
275 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
276 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
277 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
278 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
281 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
285 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
286 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
287 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
288 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
291 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
292 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
293 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
294 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
296 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
297 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
298 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
300 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
301 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
302 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
305 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
306 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
308 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
309 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
312 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
313 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
314 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
315 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
317 ** Changes in behavior
319 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
320 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
321 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
322 due to -n, -i, or -u.
326 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
327 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
328 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
331 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
335 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
336 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
337 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
338 total line in this case.
339 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
341 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
342 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
345 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
348 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
349 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
350 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
353 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
354 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
355 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
356 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
357 which may have resulted in data corruption.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
360 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
361 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
362 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
364 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
367 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
368 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
369 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
371 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
372 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
373 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
375 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
376 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
377 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
379 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
380 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
381 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
382 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
383 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
385 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
386 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
387 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
388 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
389 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
391 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
392 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
395 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
396 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
397 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
399 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
400 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
401 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
402 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
404 ** Changes in behavior
406 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
407 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
408 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
409 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
410 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
411 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
413 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
414 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
416 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
417 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
418 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
419 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
421 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
422 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
423 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
425 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
426 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
427 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
428 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
430 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
431 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
432 This behavior is now documented.
434 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
435 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
437 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
438 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
439 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
441 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
442 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
443 from errors from the invoked command.
445 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
446 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
447 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
450 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
454 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
455 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
457 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
458 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
460 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
461 print details on how a file is being copied.
463 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
464 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
466 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
467 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
469 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
470 asked to move a file to a different file system.
472 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
473 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
475 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
476 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
478 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
479 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
483 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
484 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
485 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
486 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
487 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
489 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
490 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
492 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
493 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
495 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
496 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
497 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
499 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
500 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
501 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
503 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
504 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
506 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
507 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
508 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
509 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
512 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
516 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
517 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
520 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
521 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
522 before adjusting it to the correct value.
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
525 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
526 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
529 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
530 and B is in some other file system.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
533 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
534 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
535 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
537 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
540 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
541 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
542 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
543 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
546 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
547 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
550 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
551 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
554 ** Changes in behavior
556 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
557 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
558 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
560 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
561 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
562 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
563 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
565 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
566 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
568 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
569 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
570 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
572 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
573 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
575 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
576 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
577 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
578 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
579 though they still work.
581 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
582 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
583 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
585 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
586 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
588 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
589 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
590 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
592 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
593 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
594 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
595 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
599 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
600 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
602 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
603 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
605 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
606 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
610 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
611 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
613 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
614 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
615 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
618 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
620 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
621 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
622 since synchronizing can take a long time.
624 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
626 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
627 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
629 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
631 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
632 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
633 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
637 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
641 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
645 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
648 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
649 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
650 is a non regular file.
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
653 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
654 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
655 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
657 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
658 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
660 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
663 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
664 heavily changed during the run.
665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
667 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
668 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
670 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
671 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
673 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
676 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
679 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
680 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
681 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
683 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
686 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
687 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
689 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
690 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
693 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
694 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
697 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
698 invalid combinations of case character classes.
699 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
701 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
702 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
705 ** Changes in behavior
707 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
708 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
710 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
711 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
712 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
714 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
715 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
716 that was made in release 8.32.
718 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
719 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
720 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
722 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
723 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
725 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
726 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
730 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
731 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
732 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
733 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
735 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
737 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
738 when verifying tagged format checksums.
740 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
742 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
743 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
745 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
746 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
748 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
749 NUL instead of newline.
751 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
753 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
754 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
755 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
759 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
760 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
762 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
763 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
764 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
766 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
767 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
769 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
770 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
772 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
773 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
775 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
776 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
777 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
779 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
781 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
782 where avx2 instructions are supported.
783 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
790 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
791 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
792 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
794 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
795 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
796 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
797 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
798 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
800 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
801 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
802 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
803 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
804 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
805 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
807 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
810 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
811 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
812 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
815 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
816 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
817 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
818 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
820 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
821 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
823 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
824 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
825 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
826 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
828 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
829 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
830 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
832 ** Changes in behavior
834 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
835 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
836 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
837 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
838 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
841 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
842 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
843 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
844 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
845 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
846 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
847 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
848 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
851 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
852 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
853 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
854 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
856 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
857 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
858 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
860 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
861 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
865 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
866 file creation time, where available.
868 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
869 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
871 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
872 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
873 useful on network file systems.
877 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
878 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
880 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
881 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
882 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
886 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
889 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
893 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
894 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
896 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
897 after asking the user whether to proceed.
898 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
900 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
901 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
903 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
904 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
907 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
908 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
909 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
910 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
911 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
912 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
914 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
915 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
917 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
918 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
920 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
921 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
924 ** Changes in behavior
926 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
927 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
928 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
929 end-of-options marker.
931 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
934 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
935 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
937 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
938 environment variable is set.
940 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
941 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
942 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
943 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
944 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
946 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
948 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
949 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
950 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
951 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
953 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
954 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
958 id now supports specifying multiple users.
960 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
961 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
963 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
964 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
965 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
966 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
967 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
968 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
970 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
971 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
973 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
974 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
976 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
977 signal handling before executing a program.
981 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
982 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
983 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
987 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
988 which is common in Asian locales.
990 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
991 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
993 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
994 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
997 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
1001 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
1002 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
1003 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
1004 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
1005 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
1006 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
1008 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
1009 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
1010 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
1011 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1013 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
1014 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
1015 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
1016 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
1017 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
1018 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
1020 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
1021 even if it can't be traversed.
1022 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
1024 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
1025 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
1026 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
1028 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1031 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
1032 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
1033 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
1034 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
1035 now silently does nothing if A exists.
1036 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1038 ** Changes in behavior
1040 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
1041 it is self referential.
1043 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
1047 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
1049 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
1050 each processing step.
1052 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
1053 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
1056 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
1057 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
1058 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
1060 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
1061 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
1065 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
1066 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
1068 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
1069 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
1070 and tail -f uses inotify.
1072 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
1073 which is especially significant on macOS.
1076 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
1080 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
1081 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
1083 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
1084 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
1085 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
1086 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
1088 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1091 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
1092 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1094 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
1095 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
1098 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1099 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1101 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1102 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1105 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1106 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1107 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1108 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1113 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1117 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1119 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1120 rather than reading from the start.
1122 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1123 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1124 for unknown long options.
1128 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1129 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1132 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1136 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1137 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1138 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1139 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1141 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1142 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1143 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1144 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1145 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1147 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1148 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1149 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1150 now fails instead of losing the data.
1151 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1153 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1154 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1157 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1158 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1161 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1162 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1165 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1166 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1169 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1170 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1173 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1174 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1175 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1177 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1178 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1179 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1181 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1182 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1185 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1188 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1189 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1192 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1193 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1195 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1196 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1197 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1198 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1200 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1201 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1202 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1204 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1205 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1208 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1209 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1213 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1214 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1215 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1217 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1218 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1220 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1221 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1223 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1224 executing the subsidiary program.
1226 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1228 ** Changes in behavior
1230 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1231 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1232 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1233 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1237 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1239 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1240 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1242 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1243 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1244 is effective in this case.
1247 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1251 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1252 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1253 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1255 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1256 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1259 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1260 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1261 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1263 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1264 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1267 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1268 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1269 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1271 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1272 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1273 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1274 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1275 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1277 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1278 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1279 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1280 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1284 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1285 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1286 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1287 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1289 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1290 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1291 time zone is indeterminate.
1293 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1294 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1295 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1296 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1298 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1299 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1300 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1302 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1303 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1305 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1306 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1307 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1311 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1312 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1313 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1320 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1321 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1324 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1325 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1326 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1328 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1329 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1330 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1331 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1332 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1334 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1335 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1336 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1338 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1339 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1341 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1342 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1343 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1345 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1346 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1347 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1349 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1350 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1352 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1353 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1354 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1356 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1357 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1359 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1360 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1361 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1363 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1365 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1366 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1368 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1369 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1371 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1372 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1374 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1377 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1378 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1379 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1380 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1382 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1383 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1384 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1386 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1387 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1388 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1390 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1391 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1394 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1395 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1396 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1398 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1399 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1401 ** Changes in behavior
1403 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1405 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1406 values for any argument.
1408 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1409 they are out of localtime range.
1411 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1412 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1413 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1414 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1418 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1419 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1420 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1422 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1423 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1425 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1426 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1428 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1430 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1431 written to a terminal.
1433 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1434 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1436 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1437 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1438 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1439 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1440 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1441 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1442 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1443 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1444 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1445 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1446 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1448 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1449 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1453 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1454 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1458 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1460 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1461 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1463 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1470 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1471 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1472 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1475 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1476 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1478 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1479 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1480 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1482 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1483 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1485 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1486 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1489 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1490 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1492 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1493 that specify an offset for the first field.
1494 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1496 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1497 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1501 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1502 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1506 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1507 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1509 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1510 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1511 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1512 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1513 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1515 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1516 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1517 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1519 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1520 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1521 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1523 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1524 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1526 ** Changes in behavior
1528 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1529 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1531 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1532 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1534 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1535 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1537 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1538 when outputting to a terminal.
1540 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1544 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1545 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1547 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1548 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1550 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1551 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1552 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1554 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1555 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1557 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1558 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1559 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1561 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1563 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1564 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1565 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1567 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1568 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1571 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1575 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1576 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1578 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1581 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1582 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1585 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1586 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1587 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1588 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1590 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1591 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1592 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1593 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1595 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1596 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1598 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1599 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1601 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1602 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1603 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1605 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1606 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1607 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1609 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1610 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1611 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1613 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1614 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1615 character at the 4GiB position.
1616 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1618 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1619 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1621 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1622 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1624 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1625 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1626 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1628 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1629 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1631 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1632 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1633 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1635 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1636 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1638 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1639 when those files are being created or renamed.
1640 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1644 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1645 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1646 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1647 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1649 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1650 on stderr approximately every second.
1652 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1653 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1655 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1656 other than the default newline character.
1658 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1659 a useful setting with high latency links.
1661 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1662 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1664 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1665 and output errors in general.
1667 ** Changes in behavior
1669 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1670 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1671 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1672 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1674 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1675 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1676 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1677 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1678 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1680 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1681 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1683 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1685 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1686 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1688 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1689 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1693 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1694 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1696 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1697 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1699 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1700 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1702 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1703 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1705 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1707 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1708 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1709 documentation are provided.
1712 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1716 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1717 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1719 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1720 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1721 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1724 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1725 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1726 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1727 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1729 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1730 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1732 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1733 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1735 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1736 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1737 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1738 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1739 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1740 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1741 values are in octal.
1754 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1756 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1757 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1758 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1759 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1760 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1761 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1763 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1764 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1765 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1766 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1768 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1769 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1770 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1772 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1773 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1774 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1775 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1777 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1778 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1779 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1781 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1782 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1783 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1785 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1786 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1787 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1788 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1789 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1791 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1792 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1793 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1795 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1796 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1798 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1799 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1800 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1802 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1803 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1805 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1806 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1808 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1809 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1811 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1812 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1814 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1815 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1816 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1818 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1819 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1823 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1824 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1826 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1827 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1828 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1829 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1830 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1831 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1832 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1833 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1834 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1835 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1836 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1837 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1838 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1839 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1840 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1841 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1842 it suitable for embedded system.
1844 ** Changes in behavior
1846 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1847 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1849 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1850 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1852 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1853 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1854 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1856 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1857 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1858 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1862 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1863 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1864 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1866 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1868 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1869 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1870 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1872 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1873 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1874 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1875 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1877 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1878 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1880 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1881 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1882 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1885 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1889 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1890 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1891 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1893 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1894 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1895 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1896 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1898 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1899 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1900 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1902 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1903 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1905 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1907 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1908 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1909 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1911 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1912 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1913 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1915 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1916 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1917 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1918 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1920 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1921 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1922 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1924 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1925 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1926 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1928 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1929 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1931 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1932 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1933 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1934 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1936 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1937 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1938 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1940 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1941 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1942 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1946 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1947 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1948 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1950 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1951 used to identify the split points.
1953 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1954 command line argument through to the output.
1956 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1959 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1960 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1962 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1963 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1965 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1967 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1968 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1969 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1971 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1972 unique groups with empty lines.
1974 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1975 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1977 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1980 ** Changes in behavior
1982 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1983 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1984 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1985 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1987 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1988 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1990 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1991 not just the transfer counts.
1993 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1995 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1996 as per the documented interface.
2000 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
2002 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
2003 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
2004 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
2005 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2007 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
2008 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
2009 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
2010 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
2012 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
2013 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
2014 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
2016 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
2017 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
2019 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
2020 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
2022 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
2026 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2029 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
2033 numfmt: reformat numbers
2037 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
2038 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
2039 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
2041 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
2042 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
2043 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
2045 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
2046 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
2050 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
2051 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2053 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
2054 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
2055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2057 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
2058 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
2059 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2061 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
2062 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
2063 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2065 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
2066 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
2067 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
2069 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
2070 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
2071 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
2073 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2076 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
2077 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
2079 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
2080 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
2081 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
2083 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
2084 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
2085 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2087 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
2088 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
2089 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2091 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
2092 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
2093 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
2094 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2096 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
2097 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
2098 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2100 ** Changes in behavior
2102 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2103 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2104 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2105 'total' in the target column.
2107 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2108 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2109 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2111 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2112 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2114 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2115 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2119 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2120 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2122 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2123 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2125 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2129 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2130 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2131 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2132 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2133 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2134 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2135 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2136 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2137 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2138 for a patched distribution package.
2140 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2141 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2143 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2144 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2145 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2146 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2149 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2153 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2155 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2156 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2157 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2161 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2162 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2163 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2164 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2165 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2167 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2168 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2170 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2171 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2172 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2173 eventually exits nonzero.
2175 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2176 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2177 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2178 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2179 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2181 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2182 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2185 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2186 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2189 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2190 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2193 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2194 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2195 Before, this would infloop:
2196 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2197 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2199 ** Changes in behavior
2201 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2205 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2206 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2207 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2208 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2209 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2212 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2213 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2214 format-changing options.
2216 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2217 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2218 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2219 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2220 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2224 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2225 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2226 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2227 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2228 are run without following the instructions in README.
2230 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2231 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2232 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2233 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2234 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2235 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2236 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2239 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2243 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2244 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2245 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2246 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2248 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2249 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2250 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2253 sort -u could read freed memory.
2254 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2255 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2256 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2260 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2261 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2262 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2263 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2270 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2271 processes will not intersperse their output.
2272 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2274 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2275 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2276 date: invalid date '\260'
2277 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2279 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2280 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2281 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2282 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2284 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2285 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2286 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2288 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2289 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2290 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2291 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2292 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2293 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2295 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2296 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2298 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2299 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2301 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2302 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2303 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2305 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2306 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2307 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2311 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2313 ** Changes in behavior
2315 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2316 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2317 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2318 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2319 have any reason to include it here.
2323 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2324 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2325 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2327 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2328 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2329 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2332 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2336 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2337 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2338 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2339 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2340 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2341 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2343 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2344 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2345 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2346 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2347 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2348 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2349 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2351 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2352 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2354 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2355 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2359 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2360 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2362 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2364 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2366 ** Changes in behavior
2368 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2369 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2370 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2372 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2373 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2376 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2380 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2381 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2382 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2383 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2384 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2385 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2386 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2387 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2389 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2390 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2391 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2392 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2393 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2395 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2396 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2398 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2399 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2401 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2402 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2404 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2405 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2407 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2408 additional static suffix to output file names.
2410 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2411 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2412 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2414 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2415 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2419 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2420 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2423 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2424 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2425 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2426 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2427 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2428 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2430 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2431 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2432 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2433 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2434 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2436 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2437 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2438 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2439 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2443 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2444 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2445 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2447 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2448 instead of causing a usage failure.
2450 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2453 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2457 realpath: print resolved file names.
2461 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2462 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2464 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2465 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2467 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2468 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2469 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2470 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2471 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2472 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2474 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2475 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2476 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2478 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2479 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2482 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2483 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2484 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2485 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2486 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2488 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2490 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2491 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2493 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2494 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2495 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2497 ** Changes in behavior
2499 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2500 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2501 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2502 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2503 usually-short referent instead.
2505 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2506 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2507 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2508 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2511 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2515 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2516 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2517 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2519 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2522 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2523 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2527 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2528 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2530 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2531 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2532 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2533 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2535 ** Changes in behavior
2537 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2538 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2539 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2543 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2544 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2545 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2548 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2552 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2553 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2554 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2556 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2557 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2559 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2560 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2561 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2562 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2563 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2565 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2566 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2567 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2568 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2569 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2570 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2571 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2572 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2574 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2575 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2577 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2578 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2580 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2581 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2583 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2584 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2585 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2587 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2588 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2589 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2590 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2592 ** Changes in behavior
2594 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2595 when -v or -c specified.
2597 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2598 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2602 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2603 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2604 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2605 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2606 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2608 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2609 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2610 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2612 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2613 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2614 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2615 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2616 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2617 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2618 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2620 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2621 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2622 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2626 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2627 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2629 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2632 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2633 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2635 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2636 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2638 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2639 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2641 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2643 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2647 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2648 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2650 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2653 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2657 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2658 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2660 ** Changes in behavior
2662 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2663 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2664 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2665 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2666 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2667 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2668 resolved for 2.6.39.
2669 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2670 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2671 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2675 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2678 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2682 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2683 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2684 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2686 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2687 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2690 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2691 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2692 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2694 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2697 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2698 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2700 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2701 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2703 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2708 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2709 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2710 processed portion thereof.
2712 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2713 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2715 ** Changes in behavior
2717 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2718 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2719 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2721 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2722 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2723 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2725 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2726 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2728 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2729 Use --preserve-context instead.
2731 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2734 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2738 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2739 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2740 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2741 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2742 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2744 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2745 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2747 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2748 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2749 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2751 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2752 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2754 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2755 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2759 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2760 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2761 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2762 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2763 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2764 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2765 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2766 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2768 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2769 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2770 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2772 ** Changes in behavior
2774 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2775 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2776 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2779 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2783 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2784 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2785 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2788 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2792 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2793 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2795 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2796 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2798 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2799 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2801 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2802 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2803 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2804 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2806 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2807 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2809 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2810 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2811 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2813 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2815 ** Changes in behavior
2817 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2818 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2819 to the number of available processors.
2823 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2824 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2825 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2828 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2832 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2833 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2834 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2835 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2837 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2838 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2839 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2841 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2842 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2844 ** Changes in behavior
2846 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2847 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2849 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2850 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2851 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2852 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2853 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2854 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2856 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2857 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2858 the same way as the others.
2860 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2861 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2864 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2868 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2869 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2870 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2872 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2873 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2875 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2876 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2877 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2879 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2880 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2882 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2883 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2885 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2886 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2887 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2889 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2890 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2891 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2892 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2896 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2897 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2899 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2902 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2903 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2905 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2907 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2908 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2909 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2911 ** Changes in behavior
2913 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2914 rather than its aliased target.
2916 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2917 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2918 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2920 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2921 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2922 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2923 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2924 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2925 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2926 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2927 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2929 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2931 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2933 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2934 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2937 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2938 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2939 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2940 control like taskset for example.
2942 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2944 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2945 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2946 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2947 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2948 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2949 includes %C when context information is available.
2951 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2952 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2953 rather than a file system attribute.
2955 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2956 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2957 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2958 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2960 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2961 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2962 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2964 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2965 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2966 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2973 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2974 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2976 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2978 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2979 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2981 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2982 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2983 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2984 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2986 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2987 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2988 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2992 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2993 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2995 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2996 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2997 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2999 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
3000 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
3001 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
3002 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
3003 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
3004 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
3005 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
3006 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
3007 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
3009 ** Changes in behavior
3011 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
3012 sequence when it would be a no-op.
3014 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
3015 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
3018 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
3022 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
3023 of available processors, which may not have been the case
3024 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
3025 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3029 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
3030 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
3032 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
3033 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
3034 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
3035 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
3037 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
3038 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
3039 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
3042 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
3046 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
3047 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
3048 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
3050 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
3051 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
3052 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
3054 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
3055 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3057 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
3058 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3059 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
3060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3062 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
3063 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
3064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3066 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
3067 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
3068 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
3069 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3071 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
3072 renamed-aside and then recreated.
3073 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3075 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
3076 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
3077 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
3078 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3080 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
3081 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
3082 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3084 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
3085 processes will not intersperse their output.
3086 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
3089 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
3093 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
3094 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3096 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
3097 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3099 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3100 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3101 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3102 the presence of the empty string argument.
3103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3105 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3106 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3107 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3108 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3110 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3113 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3114 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3115 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3117 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3118 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3119 and with a malicious user on the same system
3120 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3121 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3124 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3128 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3129 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3130 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3132 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3133 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3134 offending directory and all "contents."
3136 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3137 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3138 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3140 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3141 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3142 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3144 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3145 processes will not intersperse their output.
3146 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3147 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3149 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3150 output the name of the file to stdout.
3151 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3153 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3154 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3157 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3158 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3161 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3162 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3163 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3165 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3166 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3167 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3168 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3169 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3170 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3172 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3173 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3174 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3175 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3177 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3178 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3180 ** Changes in behavior
3182 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3183 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3184 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3185 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3186 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3188 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3189 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3190 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3191 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3193 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3195 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3196 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3197 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3198 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3199 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3203 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3207 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3208 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3210 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3211 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3213 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3214 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3215 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3217 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3218 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3225 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3226 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3227 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3229 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3230 to accommodate leap seconds.
3231 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3233 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3234 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3235 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3237 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3239 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3240 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3241 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3243 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3244 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3245 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3246 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3247 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3251 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3252 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3253 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3254 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3256 ** Changes in behavior
3258 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3259 environment variable is set.
3261 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3262 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3263 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3267 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3268 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3269 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3270 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3272 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3273 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3274 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3275 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3279 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3280 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3281 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3283 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3284 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3285 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3286 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3287 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3288 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3289 another improvement:
3291 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3292 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3295 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3299 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3300 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3301 and libraries tested at configure time.
3302 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3304 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3305 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3307 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3310 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3311 printing a summary to stderr.
3312 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3314 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3315 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3316 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3318 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3319 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3321 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3322 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3323 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3324 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3326 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3327 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3328 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3329 which is relatively unusual.
3330 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3332 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3333 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3334 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3335 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3336 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3337 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3338 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3342 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3343 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3344 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3345 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3346 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3350 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3351 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3353 ** Changes in behavior
3355 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3356 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3357 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3358 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3359 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3362 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3366 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3367 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3369 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3370 before data copying has started.
3372 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3373 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3375 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3376 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3377 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3378 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3380 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3381 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3382 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3383 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3385 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3390 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3391 for its standard streams.
3393 ** Changes in behavior
3395 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3396 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3397 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3398 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3399 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3400 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3402 ** Deprecated options
3404 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3405 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3409 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3411 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3412 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3413 a btrfs file system.
3415 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3417 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3418 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3420 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3421 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3424 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3428 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3429 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3430 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3431 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3433 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3434 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3435 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3436 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3437 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3442 make check: two tests have been corrected
3446 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3447 inherited from gnulib.
3450 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3454 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3455 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3456 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3457 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3459 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3460 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3462 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3464 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3465 systems without xattr support.
3467 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3468 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3469 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3471 ** Changes in behavior
3473 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3474 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3475 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3476 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3478 ** Improved robustness
3480 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3481 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3482 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3483 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3484 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3485 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3486 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3487 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3488 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3492 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3493 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3495 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3496 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3497 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3498 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3499 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3502 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3506 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3507 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3508 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3512 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3513 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3514 data was read, or on process exit.
3515 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3517 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3518 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3519 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3520 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3522 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3523 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3524 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3525 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3527 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3528 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3530 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3531 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3533 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3534 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3535 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3537 ** Changes in behavior
3539 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3540 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3541 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3543 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3544 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3546 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3547 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3548 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3551 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3555 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3557 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3558 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3559 install: Never copies xattrs
3561 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3562 from overwriting any existing destination file
3564 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3565 mode where this feature is available.
3567 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3568 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3569 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3570 do not modify the destination at all.
3572 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3574 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3578 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3579 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3581 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3583 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3584 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3586 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3587 processing the first file name
3589 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3590 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3591 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3592 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3594 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3595 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3597 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3598 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3601 ** Changes in behavior
3603 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3604 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3606 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3607 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3608 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3610 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3611 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3613 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3615 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3616 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3617 is still marked with a '+'.
3620 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3624 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3625 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3629 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3630 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3631 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3632 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3633 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3634 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3636 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3637 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3639 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3640 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3642 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3644 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3645 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3646 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3648 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3649 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3651 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3652 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3653 used to factor large numbers.
3655 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3658 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3660 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3662 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3663 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3665 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3666 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3667 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3668 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3670 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3671 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3672 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3674 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3675 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3679 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3681 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3682 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3684 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3685 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3687 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3689 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3690 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3694 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3695 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3696 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3698 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3700 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3701 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3702 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3704 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3705 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3706 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3708 ** Changes in behavior
3710 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3711 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3714 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3718 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3719 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3720 'futimens' system calls.
3724 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3726 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3727 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3728 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3730 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3731 with no USERNAME argument.
3733 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3734 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3735 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3737 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3738 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3739 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3740 number of fields for some inputs.
3742 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3743 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3745 ** Changes in behavior
3747 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3748 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3751 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3755 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3757 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3758 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3759 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3760 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3762 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3763 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3765 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3766 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3768 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3769 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3771 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3772 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3773 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3774 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3776 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3777 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3778 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3779 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3780 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3781 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3783 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3784 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3786 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3787 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3788 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3790 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3791 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3793 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3794 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3796 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3797 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3798 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3799 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3801 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3802 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3804 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3805 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3807 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3808 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3809 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3813 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3814 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3816 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3817 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3818 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3819 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3823 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3824 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3826 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3828 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3832 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3833 which have negative errno values.
3837 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3841 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3845 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3846 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3849 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3853 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3854 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3855 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3857 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3858 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3859 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3860 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3864 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3865 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3866 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3867 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3870 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3874 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3876 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3877 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3878 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3881 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3885 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3886 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3888 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3890 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3892 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3894 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3898 ** Changes in behavior
3900 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3901 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3903 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3904 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3906 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3907 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3908 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3912 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3913 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3914 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3915 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3916 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3917 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3918 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3919 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3920 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3921 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3922 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3924 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3925 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3926 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3929 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3932 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3933 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3934 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3936 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3937 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3938 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3941 ** New build options
3943 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3944 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3945 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3946 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3948 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3949 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3950 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3951 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3952 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3953 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3954 of "make check" fail.
3956 ** Remove deprecated options
3958 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3959 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3960 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3961 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3962 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3964 ** Improved robustness
3966 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3967 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3968 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3969 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3970 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3971 loss of the contents of a/f.
3973 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3974 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3978 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3979 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3980 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3982 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3983 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3984 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3985 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3987 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3988 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3989 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3990 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3991 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3992 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3993 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3994 destination is a symlink.
3996 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3998 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3999 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
4001 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
4002 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
4004 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
4006 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
4007 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
4009 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
4010 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
4012 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
4015 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
4016 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
4018 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
4019 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
4021 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
4022 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
4023 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
4024 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4026 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
4027 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
4028 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4030 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
4031 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
4032 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
4034 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
4035 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
4036 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
4037 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
4039 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
4040 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
4041 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
4043 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
4044 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
4046 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
4047 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
4049 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
4051 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
4052 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
4053 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
4055 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
4056 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
4058 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
4059 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
4061 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
4062 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
4064 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
4065 [present in the original version]
4068 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
4072 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
4074 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
4075 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
4076 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
4078 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
4079 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
4081 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
4085 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
4086 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
4088 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
4089 support but with insufficient /proc support.
4091 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
4092 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
4094 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
4095 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
4096 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
4097 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
4098 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4099 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4101 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4102 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4105 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4106 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4108 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4111 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4112 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4113 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4115 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4116 directory is unreadable.
4118 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4119 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4120 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4122 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4123 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4124 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4125 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4126 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4129 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4130 Before it would print nothing.
4132 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4134 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4135 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4136 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4137 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4138 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4139 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4140 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4141 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4143 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4147 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4148 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4149 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4151 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4152 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4153 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4154 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4157 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4161 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4162 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4163 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4164 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4165 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4166 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4167 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4169 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4170 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4171 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4172 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4173 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4174 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4175 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4176 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4178 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4179 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4180 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4183 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4187 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4188 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4190 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4191 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4192 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4194 ** Improved robustness
4196 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4197 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4198 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4201 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4205 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4206 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4207 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4208 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4209 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4211 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4215 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4218 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4222 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4223 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4224 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4225 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4227 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4228 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4230 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4231 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4232 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4235 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4237 ** Improved robustness
4239 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4240 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4242 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4243 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4244 or NFS-mounted partition.
4246 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4247 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4251 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4252 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4253 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4254 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4255 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4256 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4258 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4259 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4261 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4262 or neglect to report file removal.
4264 For the "groups" command:
4266 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4267 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4269 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4271 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4273 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4277 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4278 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4281 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4283 ** Changes in behavior
4285 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4286 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4287 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4288 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4290 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4291 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4292 a final './' or '../' component.
4294 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4295 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4296 this only for pipes.
4298 ** Infrastructure changes
4300 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4301 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4302 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4303 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4307 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4308 name is "." or "..".
4310 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4311 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4312 dirent.d_type support.
4314 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4315 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4317 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4318 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4319 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4320 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4323 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4325 ** Changes in behavior
4327 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4331 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4332 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4336 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4337 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4338 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4340 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4341 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4343 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4344 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4346 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4348 ** Improved robustness
4350 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4351 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4352 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4354 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4355 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4358 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4359 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4361 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4362 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4364 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4365 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4367 ** Changes in behavior
4369 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4370 where the two are distinct.
4372 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4373 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4374 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4375 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4376 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4377 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4378 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4379 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4380 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4381 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4382 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4383 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4384 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4385 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4386 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4387 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4388 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4390 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4391 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4392 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4394 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4395 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4396 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4397 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4400 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4401 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4405 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4406 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4407 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4408 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4410 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4411 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4412 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4414 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4415 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4416 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4417 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4418 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4421 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4422 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4424 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4425 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4426 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4427 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4429 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4430 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4431 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4433 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4434 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4435 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4436 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4438 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4439 and sticky) with the -m option.
4441 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4442 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4443 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4444 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4445 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4447 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4448 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4450 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4454 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4455 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4456 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4457 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4459 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4461 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4463 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4464 silently ignoring one of them.
4466 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4467 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4468 containing this change was 5.92.
4470 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4471 automatically newline terminated.
4473 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4474 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4475 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4476 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4479 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4480 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4481 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4484 ** Scheduled for removal
4486 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4487 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4489 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4490 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4491 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4492 command to unlink a directory.
4494 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4495 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4496 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4497 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4501 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4502 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4503 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4504 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4505 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4506 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4510 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4511 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4513 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4515 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4516 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4517 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4519 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4520 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4523 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4524 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4526 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4527 list directories before files.
4529 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4530 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4531 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4532 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4535 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4537 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4539 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4540 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4541 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4543 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4544 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4548 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4549 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4550 usually printing nothing.
4552 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4554 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4555 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4556 them with hard-linked directories.
4558 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4559 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4560 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4562 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4563 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4564 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4566 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4569 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4570 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4572 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4573 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4575 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4576 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4578 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4579 all command-line arguments.
4581 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4583 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4585 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4586 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4588 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4590 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4591 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4592 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4593 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4594 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4596 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4597 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4599 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4600 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4601 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4602 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4604 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4606 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4610 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4611 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4613 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4614 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4616 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4617 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4619 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4620 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4622 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4623 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4625 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4627 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4628 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4629 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4632 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4634 ** Build-related bug fixes
4636 installing .mo files would fail
4639 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4643 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4645 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4648 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4652 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4653 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4657 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4659 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4660 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4662 ** Deprecated options
4664 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4665 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4667 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4671 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4673 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4674 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4675 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4676 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4678 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4681 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4687 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4692 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4694 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4696 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4697 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4698 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4700 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4701 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4702 problematic usages. These include:
4704 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4705 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4706 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4707 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4708 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4709 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4710 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4711 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4712 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4714 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4715 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4717 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4718 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4719 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4720 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4722 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4723 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4724 between binary and text files.
4726 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4730 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4734 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4735 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4737 head tac tail tee tr
4738 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4740 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4741 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4743 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4744 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4745 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4747 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4749 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4751 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4752 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4753 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4757 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4759 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4760 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4762 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4763 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4764 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4768 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4769 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4773 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4774 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4775 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4779 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4780 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4784 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4786 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4788 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4792 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4793 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4794 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4796 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4797 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4798 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4799 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4800 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4802 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4806 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4807 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4808 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4810 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4812 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4813 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4814 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4815 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4817 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4819 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4820 rather than silently wrapping around.
4822 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4823 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4825 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4826 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4828 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4829 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4830 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4831 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4833 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4835 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4837 ** Improved robustness
4839 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4840 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4841 no matter how large the result.
4843 ** Improved portability
4845 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4846 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4848 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4850 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4851 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4852 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4854 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4855 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4859 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4860 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4862 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4864 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4865 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4866 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4867 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4869 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4870 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4872 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4873 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4874 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4876 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4878 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4879 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4881 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4882 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4884 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4886 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4887 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4889 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4890 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4892 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4893 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4894 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4896 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4898 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4900 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4904 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4906 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4907 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4908 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4910 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4911 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4913 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4914 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4915 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4917 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4918 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4920 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4921 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4922 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4923 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4925 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4926 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4928 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4929 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4930 the file system does not support it.
4932 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4934 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4935 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4937 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4939 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4940 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4942 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4943 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4944 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4945 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4947 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4948 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4951 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4952 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4953 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4954 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4956 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4957 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4958 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4959 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4961 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4962 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4964 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4966 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4967 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4968 reporting incorrect results.
4972 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4973 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4975 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4978 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4980 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4981 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4983 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4984 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4986 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4989 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4990 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4991 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4992 the file name does not look like a page range.
4994 printf has several changes:
4996 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4997 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4999 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
5000 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
5001 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
5003 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
5004 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
5007 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
5008 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
5010 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
5011 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
5013 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
5015 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
5016 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
5018 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
5020 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
5022 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
5023 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
5024 when first encountering the directory.
5028 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
5029 output; POSIX requires this.
5031 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
5032 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
5034 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
5036 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
5037 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
5039 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
5040 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
5042 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
5043 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
5044 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
5045 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
5046 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
5047 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
5048 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
5050 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
5051 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
5052 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
5054 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
5055 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
5057 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
5059 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
5061 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
5062 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
5063 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
5064 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
5066 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
5070 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
5071 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
5072 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
5073 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
5074 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
5076 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
5077 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
5078 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
5080 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
5081 is longer than PATH_MAX.
5083 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
5084 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
5086 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
5087 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
5088 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
5089 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
5090 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
5092 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
5093 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
5095 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
5096 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
5098 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5100 nocreat do not create the output file
5101 excl fail if the output file already exists
5102 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5103 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5105 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5107 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5108 direct use direct I/O for data
5109 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5110 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5111 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5112 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5113 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5115 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5117 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5118 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5121 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5122 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5123 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5124 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5125 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5126 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5128 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5129 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5131 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5134 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5136 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5138 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5139 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5141 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5142 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5143 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5145 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5146 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5147 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5149 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5151 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5152 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5154 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5155 for compatibility with bash.
5157 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5159 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5160 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5161 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5162 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5164 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5165 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5167 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5168 ls supports TABSIZE.
5169 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5170 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5171 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5173 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5176 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5178 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5179 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5180 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5181 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5182 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5183 an offset, not as a file name.
5185 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5186 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5188 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5189 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5191 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5192 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5194 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5195 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5196 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5198 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5199 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5201 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5202 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5206 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5208 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5210 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5214 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5215 or more arguments between partitions.
5217 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5218 holes in the destination.
5220 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5221 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5222 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5223 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5224 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5225 terminates immediately.
5227 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5229 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5231 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5232 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5233 not the empty string.
5235 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5236 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5240 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5241 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5242 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5245 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5252 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5256 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5257 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5259 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5260 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5262 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5263 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5264 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5267 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5271 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5272 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5274 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5275 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5277 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5278 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5279 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5281 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5283 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5286 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5288 ** Configuration option
5290 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5291 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5295 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5296 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5300 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5301 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5302 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5305 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5306 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5307 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5308 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5309 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5310 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5311 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5314 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5318 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5319 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5320 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5322 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5323 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5325 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5327 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5328 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5329 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5330 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5332 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5334 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5335 not just the ones that reference directories
5337 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5338 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5340 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5341 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5342 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5344 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5345 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5346 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5347 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5348 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5349 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5351 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5356 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5357 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5359 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5361 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5363 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5365 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5366 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5368 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5369 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5371 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5373 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5377 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5379 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5381 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5382 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5383 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5384 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5385 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5387 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5388 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5390 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5391 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5393 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5394 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5396 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5397 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5398 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5402 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5403 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5404 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5405 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5406 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5407 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5408 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5409 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5410 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5411 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5412 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5413 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5414 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5415 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5417 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5419 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5420 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5422 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5424 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5426 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5427 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5429 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5431 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5432 without a trailing newline.
5434 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5435 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5437 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5440 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5444 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5446 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5448 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5449 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5450 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5451 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5453 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5455 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5456 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5457 be printed without leading spaces.
5459 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5460 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5465 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5466 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5467 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5469 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5471 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5472 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5474 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5475 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5477 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5478 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5480 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5482 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5484 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5486 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5487 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5489 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5491 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5493 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5494 byte offsets are specified.
5497 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5500 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5503 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5504 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5505 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5506 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5507 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5508 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5509 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5510 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5511 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5512 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5513 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5514 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5515 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5516 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5517 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5518 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5519 directory where M has write access.
5520 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5521 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5522 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5525 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5526 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5527 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5528 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5529 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5530 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5531 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5532 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5533 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5534 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5535 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5536 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5537 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5538 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5539 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5540 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5541 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5542 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5543 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5544 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5545 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5546 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5547 appeared one additional time.
5549 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5550 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5551 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5552 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5555 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5556 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5557 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5558 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5559 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5560 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5561 if there were more than 338.
5563 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5564 - false --help now exits nonzero
5567 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5568 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5569 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5570 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5573 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5574 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5575 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5576 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5577 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5580 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5581 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5582 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5583 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5584 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5585 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5586 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5589 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5590 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5591 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5592 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5593 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5594 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5596 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5597 under certain unusual conditions
5598 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5599 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5602 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5603 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5604 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5605 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5606 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5607 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5608 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5609 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5610 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5611 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5612 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5613 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5614 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5615 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5616 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5617 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5620 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5621 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5624 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5625 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5626 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5627 involving hard-linked directories
5628 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5629 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5630 character-special and block files
5633 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5634 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5635 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5636 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5637 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5638 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5639 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5640 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5641 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5643 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5644 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5645 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5646 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5647 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5648 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5649 specified on the command line.
5650 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5651 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5652 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5653 the first file untouched.
5654 * readlink: new program
5655 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5656 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5657 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5658 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5659 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5660 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5663 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5664 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5665 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5666 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5667 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5668 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5669 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5670 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5671 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5672 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5673 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5674 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5676 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5677 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5678 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5680 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5681 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5682 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5683 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5684 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5685 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5686 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5687 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5690 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5691 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5694 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5695 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5696 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5697 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5698 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5699 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5700 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5703 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5704 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5706 ========================================================================
5707 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5708 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5711 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5713 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5714 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5715 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5716 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5717 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5718 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5719 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5720 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5721 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5722 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5723 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5724 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5726 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5727 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5728 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5729 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5731 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5734 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5736 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5737 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5738 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5739 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5740 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5741 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5742 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5745 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5746 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5747 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5748 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5749 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5750 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5751 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5752 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5753 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5754 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5755 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5756 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5757 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5758 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5759 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5760 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5762 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5763 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5765 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5766 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5767 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5768 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5769 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5770 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5772 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5773 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5774 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5775 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5776 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5777 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5778 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5780 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5781 the source files in the following example:
5782 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5783 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5784 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5785 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5786 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5787 links between source files with --preserve=links
5788 * cp accepts new options:
5789 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5790 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5791 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5792 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5793 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5794 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5795 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5796 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5797 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5799 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5800 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5801 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5802 even though it's older than dest.
5803 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5804 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5805 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5806 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5807 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5809 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5810 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5811 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5812 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5813 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5814 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5815 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5817 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5818 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5819 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5821 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5822 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5823 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5824 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5825 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5826 This is the default.
5828 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5829 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5830 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5831 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5832 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5834 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5837 ========================================================================
5838 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5839 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5842 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5843 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5845 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5846 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5847 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5848 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5849 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5851 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5852 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5853 that specifies a non-directory
5856 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5857 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5858 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5859 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5860 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5861 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5862 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5863 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5864 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5865 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5866 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5867 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5868 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5869 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5870 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5871 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5872 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5873 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5874 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5875 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5876 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5877 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5878 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5879 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5881 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5882 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5883 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5885 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5887 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5888 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5890 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5891 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5892 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5893 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5894 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5896 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5897 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5898 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5899 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5900 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5902 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5904 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5905 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5906 * still more portability fixes
5907 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5908 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5910 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5912 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5914 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5916 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5917 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5918 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5919 there is any time remaining
5920 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5922 ========================================================================
5923 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5924 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5926 This package began as the union of the following:
5927 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5929 ========================================================================
5931 Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5933 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5934 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5935 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5936 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5937 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5938 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.