1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
8 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
10 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
12 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
13 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
14 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
18 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
19 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
20 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
22 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
23 unique groups with empty lines.
27 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS and UBIFS.
28 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
29 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
30 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
32 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
33 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
34 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
38 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
41 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
45 numfmt: reformat numbers
49 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
50 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
51 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
53 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
54 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
55 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
59 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
60 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
62 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
63 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
66 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
67 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
68 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
70 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
71 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
72 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
74 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
75 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
76 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
78 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
79 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
80 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
82 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
85 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
86 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
88 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
89 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
90 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
92 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
93 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
94 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
96 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
97 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
98 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
100 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
101 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
102 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
103 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
105 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
106 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
107 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
109 ** Changes in behavior
111 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
112 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
113 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
114 'total' in the target column.
116 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
117 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
118 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
120 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
121 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
125 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
126 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
128 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
129 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
131 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
135 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
136 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
137 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
138 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
139 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
140 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
141 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
142 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
143 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
144 for a patched distribution package.
146 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
147 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
149 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
150 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
151 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
152 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
159 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
161 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
162 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
163 sha384sum and sha512sum.
167 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
168 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
169 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
170 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
171 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
173 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
174 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
176 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
177 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
178 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
179 eventually exits nonzero.
181 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
182 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
183 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
184 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
187 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
188 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
191 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
192 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
195 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
196 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
199 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
200 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
201 Before, this would infloop:
202 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
203 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
205 ** Changes in behavior
207 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
211 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
212 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
213 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
214 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
215 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
218 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
219 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
220 format-changing options.
222 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
223 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
224 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
225 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
226 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
230 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
231 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
232 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
233 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
234 are run without following the instructions in README.
236 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
237 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
238 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
239 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
240 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
241 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
242 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
249 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
250 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
251 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
252 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
254 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
255 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
256 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
257 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
259 sort -u could read freed memory.
260 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
261 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
262 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
266 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
267 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
268 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
269 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
272 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
276 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
277 processes will not intersperse their output.
278 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
280 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
281 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
282 date: invalid date '\260'
283 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
285 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
286 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
287 lines output by df, can work reliably.
288 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
290 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
291 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
292 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
294 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
295 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
296 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
297 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
298 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
299 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
301 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
302 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
304 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
305 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
307 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
308 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
309 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
311 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
312 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
313 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
317 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
319 ** Changes in behavior
321 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
322 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
323 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
324 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
325 have any reason to include it here.
329 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
330 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
331 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
333 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
334 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
335 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
338 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
342 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
343 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
344 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
345 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
346 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
347 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
349 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
350 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
351 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
352 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
353 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
354 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
355 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
357 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
360 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
361 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
365 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
366 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
368 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
370 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
372 ** Changes in behavior
374 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
375 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
376 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
378 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
379 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
382 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
386 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
387 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
388 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
389 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
390 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
391 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
392 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
393 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
395 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
396 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
397 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
398 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
399 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
401 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
402 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
404 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
405 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
407 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
408 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
410 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
411 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
413 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
414 additional static suffix to output file names.
416 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
417 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
418 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
420 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
421 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
425 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
426 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
429 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
430 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
431 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
432 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
433 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
434 typically still point to one of the hard links.
436 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
437 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
438 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
439 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
440 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
442 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
443 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
444 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
445 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
449 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
450 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
451 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
453 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
454 instead of causing a usage failure.
456 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
459 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
463 realpath: print resolved file names.
467 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
470 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
473 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
474 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
475 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
476 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
477 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
480 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
481 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
482 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
484 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
485 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
488 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
489 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
490 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
491 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
494 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
496 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
499 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
500 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
501 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
503 ** Changes in behavior
505 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
506 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
507 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
508 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
509 usually-short referent instead.
511 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
512 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
513 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
514 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
517 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
521 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
522 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
523 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
525 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
526 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
528 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
533 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
534 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
536 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
537 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
538 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
539 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
541 ** Changes in behavior
543 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
544 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
545 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
549 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
550 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
551 only .tar.xz files is enough.
554 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
558 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
559 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
560 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
562 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
563 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
565 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
566 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
567 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
568 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
569 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
571 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
572 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
573 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
574 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
575 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
576 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
577 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
578 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
580 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
581 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
583 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
584 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
586 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
589 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
590 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
591 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
593 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
594 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
595 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
598 ** Changes in behavior
600 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
601 when -v or -c specified.
603 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
604 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
608 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
609 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
610 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
611 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
612 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
614 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
615 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
616 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
618 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
619 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
620 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
621 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
622 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
623 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
624 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
626 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
627 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
628 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
632 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
633 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
635 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
638 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
639 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
641 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
642 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
644 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
645 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
647 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
649 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
653 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
654 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
656 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
659 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
663 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
664 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
666 ** Changes in behavior
668 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
669 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
670 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
671 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
672 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
673 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
675 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
676 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
677 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
681 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
684 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
688 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
689 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
692 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
693 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
696 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
697 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
700 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
703 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
706 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
709 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
714 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
715 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
716 processed portion thereof.
718 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
719 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
721 ** Changes in behavior
723 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
724 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
725 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
727 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
728 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
729 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
731 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
732 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
734 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
735 Use --preserve-context instead.
737 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
740 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
744 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
745 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
746 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
747 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
750 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
751 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
753 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
754 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
755 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
757 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
758 reject file names invalid for that file system.
760 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
761 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
765 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
766 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
767 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
768 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
769 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
770 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
771 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
772 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
774 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
775 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
776 the same number of fields are output for each line.
778 ** Changes in behavior
780 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
781 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
782 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
785 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
789 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
790 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
791 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
794 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
798 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
799 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
801 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
802 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
804 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
805 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
807 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
808 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
809 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
812 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
813 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
815 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
816 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
817 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
819 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
821 ** Changes in behavior
823 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
824 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
825 to the number of available processors.
829 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
832 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
836 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
837 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
838 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
839 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
841 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
842 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
843 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
845 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
846 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
848 ** Changes in behavior
850 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
851 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
853 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
854 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
855 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
856 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
857 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
858 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
860 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
861 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
862 the same way as the others.
865 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
869 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
870 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
871 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
873 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
874 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
876 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
877 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
878 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
880 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
883 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
886 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
887 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
888 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
890 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
891 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
892 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
893 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
897 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
898 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
900 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
903 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
904 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
906 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
908 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
909 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
910 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
912 ** Changes in behavior
914 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
915 rather than its aliased target.
917 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
918 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
919 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
921 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
922 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
923 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
924 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
925 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
926 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
927 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
928 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
930 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
932 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
934 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
935 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
938 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
939 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
940 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
941 control like taskset for example.
943 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
945 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
946 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
947 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
948 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
949 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
950 includes %C when context information is available.
952 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
953 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
954 rather than a file system attribute.
956 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
957 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
958 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
959 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
961 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
962 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
963 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
965 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
966 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
967 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
970 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
974 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
977 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
979 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
982 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
983 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
984 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
985 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
987 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
988 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
993 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
994 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
996 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
997 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
998 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1000 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1001 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1002 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1003 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1004 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1005 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1006 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1007 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1008 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1010 ** Changes in behavior
1012 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1013 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1015 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1016 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1019 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1023 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1024 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1025 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1030 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1031 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1033 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1034 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1035 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1036 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1038 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1039 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1040 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1043 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1047 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1048 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1049 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1051 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1052 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1053 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1055 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1056 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1058 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1059 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1060 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1061 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1063 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1064 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1065 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1067 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1068 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1069 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1070 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1072 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1073 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1076 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1077 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1078 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1079 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1081 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1082 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1085 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1086 processes will not intersperse their output.
1087 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1090 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1094 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1095 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1097 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1100 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1101 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1102 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1103 the presence of the empty string argument.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1106 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1107 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1108 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1109 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1111 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1112 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1114 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1115 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1116 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1118 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1119 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1120 and with a malicious user on the same system
1121 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1122 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1129 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1130 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1133 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1134 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1135 offending directory and all "contents."
1137 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1138 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1139 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1141 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1142 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1143 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1145 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1146 processes will not intersperse their output.
1147 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1148 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1150 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1151 output the name of the file to stdout.
1152 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1154 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1155 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1156 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1158 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1159 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1162 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1163 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1164 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1166 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1167 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1168 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1169 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1170 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1171 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1173 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1174 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1175 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1176 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1178 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1179 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1181 ** Changes in behavior
1183 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1184 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1185 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1186 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1187 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1189 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1190 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1191 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1192 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1194 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1196 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1197 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1198 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1199 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1200 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1204 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1208 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1209 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1211 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1212 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1214 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1215 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1216 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1218 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1219 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1226 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1227 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1228 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1230 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1231 to accommodate leap seconds.
1232 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1234 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1235 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1236 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1238 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1240 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1241 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1242 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1244 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1245 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1246 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1247 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1248 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1252 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1253 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1254 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1255 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1257 ** Changes in behavior
1259 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1260 environment variable is set.
1262 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1263 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1264 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1268 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1269 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1270 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1271 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1273 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1274 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1275 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1276 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1280 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1281 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1282 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1284 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1285 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1286 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1287 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1288 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1289 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1290 another improvement:
1292 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1293 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1296 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1300 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1301 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1302 and libraries tested at configure time.
1303 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1305 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1306 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1308 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1311 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1312 printing a summary to stderr.
1313 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1315 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1316 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1317 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1319 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1320 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1322 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1323 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1324 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1325 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1327 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1328 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1329 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1330 which is relatively unusual.
1331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1333 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1334 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1335 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1336 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1337 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1338 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1339 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1343 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1344 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1345 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1346 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1347 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1351 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1352 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1354 ** Changes in behavior
1356 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1357 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1358 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1359 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1360 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1363 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1367 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1368 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1370 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1371 before data copying has started.
1373 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1374 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1376 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1377 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1378 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1379 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1381 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1382 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1383 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1384 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1386 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1391 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1392 for its standard streams.
1394 ** Changes in behavior
1396 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1397 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1398 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1399 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1400 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1401 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1403 ** Deprecated options
1405 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1406 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1410 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1412 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1413 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1414 a btrfs file system.
1416 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1418 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1419 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1421 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1422 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1425 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1429 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1430 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1431 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1432 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1434 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1435 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1436 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1437 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1438 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1443 make check: two tests have been corrected
1447 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1448 inherited from gnulib.
1451 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1455 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1456 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1457 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1458 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1460 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1461 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1463 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1465 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1466 systems without xattr support.
1468 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1469 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1470 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1472 ** Changes in behavior
1474 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1475 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1476 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1477 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1479 ** Improved robustness
1481 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1482 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1483 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1484 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1485 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1486 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1487 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1488 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1489 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1493 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1494 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1496 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1497 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1498 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1499 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1500 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1503 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1507 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1508 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1509 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1513 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1514 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1515 data was read, or on process exit.
1516 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1518 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1519 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1520 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1521 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1523 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1524 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1525 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1526 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1528 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1529 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1531 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1532 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1534 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1535 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1536 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1538 ** Changes in behavior
1540 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1541 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1542 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1544 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1545 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1547 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1548 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1549 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1552 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1556 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1558 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1559 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1560 install: Never copies xattrs
1562 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1563 from overwriting any existing destination file
1565 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1566 mode where this feature is available.
1568 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1569 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1570 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1571 do not modify the destination at all.
1573 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1575 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1579 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1580 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1582 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1584 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1585 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1587 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1588 processing the first file name
1590 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1591 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1592 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1593 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1595 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1596 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1598 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1599 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1602 ** Changes in behavior
1604 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1605 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1607 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1608 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1609 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1611 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1612 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1614 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1616 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1617 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1618 is still marked with a '+'.
1621 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1625 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1626 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1630 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1631 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1632 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1633 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1634 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1635 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1637 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1638 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1640 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1641 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1643 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1645 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1646 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1647 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1649 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1650 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1652 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1653 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1654 used to factor large numbers.
1656 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1659 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1661 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1663 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1664 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1666 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1667 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1668 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1669 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1671 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1672 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1673 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1675 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1676 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1680 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1682 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1683 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1685 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1686 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1688 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1690 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1691 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1695 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1696 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1697 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1699 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1701 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1702 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1703 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1705 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1706 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1707 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1709 ** Changes in behavior
1711 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1712 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1715 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1719 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1720 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1721 'futimens' system calls.
1725 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1727 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1728 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1729 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1731 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1732 with no USERNAME argument.
1734 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1735 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1736 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1738 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1739 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1740 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1741 number of fields for some inputs.
1743 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1744 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1746 ** Changes in behavior
1748 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1749 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1752 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1756 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1758 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1759 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1760 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1761 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1763 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1764 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1766 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1767 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1769 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1770 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1772 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1773 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1774 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1775 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1777 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1778 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1779 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1780 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1781 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1782 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1784 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1785 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1787 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1788 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1789 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1791 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1792 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1794 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1795 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1797 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1798 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1799 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1800 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1802 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1803 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1805 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1806 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1808 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1809 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1810 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1814 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1815 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1817 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1818 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1819 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1820 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1824 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1825 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1827 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1829 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1833 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1834 which have negative errno values.
1838 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1842 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1846 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1847 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1850 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1854 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1855 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1856 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1858 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1859 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1860 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1861 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1865 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1866 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1867 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1868 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1871 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1875 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1877 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1878 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1879 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1882 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1886 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1887 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1889 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1891 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1893 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1895 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1899 ** Changes in behavior
1901 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1902 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1904 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1905 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1907 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1908 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1909 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1913 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1914 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1915 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1916 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1917 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1918 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1919 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1920 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1921 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1922 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1923 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1925 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1926 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1927 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1930 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1933 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1934 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1935 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1937 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1938 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1939 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1942 ** New build options
1944 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1945 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1946 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1947 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1949 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1950 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1951 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1952 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1953 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1954 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1955 of "make check" fail.
1957 ** Remove deprecated options
1959 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1960 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1961 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1962 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1963 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1965 ** Improved robustness
1967 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1968 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1969 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1970 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1971 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1972 loss of the contents of a/f.
1974 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1975 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1979 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1980 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1981 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1983 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1984 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1985 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1986 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1988 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1989 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1990 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1991 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1992 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1993 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1994 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1995 destination is a symlink.
1997 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1999 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2000 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2002 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2003 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2005 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2007 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2008 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2010 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2011 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2013 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2016 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2017 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2019 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2020 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2022 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2023 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2024 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2025 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2027 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2028 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2029 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2031 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2032 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2033 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2035 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2036 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2037 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2038 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2040 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2041 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2042 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2044 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2045 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2047 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2048 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2050 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2052 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2053 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2054 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2056 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2057 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2059 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2060 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2062 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2063 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2065 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2066 [present in the original version]
2069 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2073 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2075 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2076 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2077 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2079 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2080 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2082 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2086 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2087 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2089 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2090 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2092 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2093 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2095 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2096 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2097 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2098 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2099 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2100 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2102 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2103 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2106 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2107 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2109 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2112 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2113 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2114 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2116 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2117 directory is unreadable.
2119 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2120 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2121 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2123 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2124 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2125 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2126 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2127 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2130 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2131 Before it would print nothing.
2133 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2135 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2136 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2137 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2138 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2139 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2140 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2141 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2142 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2144 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2148 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2149 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2150 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2152 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2153 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2154 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2155 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2158 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2162 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2163 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2164 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2165 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2166 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2167 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2168 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2170 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2171 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2172 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2173 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2174 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2175 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2176 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2177 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2179 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2180 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2181 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2184 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2188 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2189 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2191 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2192 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2193 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2195 ** Improved robustness
2197 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2198 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2199 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2202 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2206 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2207 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2208 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2209 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2210 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2212 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2216 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2219 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2223 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2224 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2225 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2226 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2228 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2229 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2231 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2232 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2233 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2236 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2238 ** Improved robustness
2240 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2241 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2243 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2244 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2245 or NFS-mounted partition.
2247 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2248 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2252 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2253 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2254 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2255 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2256 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2257 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2259 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2260 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2262 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2263 or neglect to report file removal.
2265 For the "groups" command:
2267 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2268 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2270 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2272 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2274 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2278 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2279 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2282 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2284 ** Changes in behavior
2286 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2287 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2288 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2289 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2291 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2292 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2293 a final './' or '../' component.
2295 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2296 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2297 this only for pipes.
2299 ** Infrastructure changes
2301 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2302 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2303 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2304 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2308 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2309 name is "." or "..".
2311 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2312 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2313 dirent.d_type support.
2315 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2316 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2318 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2319 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2320 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2321 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2324 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2326 ** Changes in behavior
2328 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2332 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2333 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2337 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2338 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2339 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2341 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2342 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2344 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2345 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2347 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2349 ** Improved robustness
2351 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2352 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2353 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2355 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2356 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2359 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2360 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2362 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2363 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2365 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2366 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2368 ** Changes in behavior
2370 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2371 where the two are distinct.
2373 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2374 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2375 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2376 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2377 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2378 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2379 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2380 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2381 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2382 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2383 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2384 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2385 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2386 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2387 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2388 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2389 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2391 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2392 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2393 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2395 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2396 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2397 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2398 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2401 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2402 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2406 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2407 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2408 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2409 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2411 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2412 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2413 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2415 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2416 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2417 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2418 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2419 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2422 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2423 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2425 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2426 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2427 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2428 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2430 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2431 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2432 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2434 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2435 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2436 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2437 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2439 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2440 and sticky) with the -m option.
2442 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2443 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2444 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2445 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2446 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2448 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2449 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2451 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2455 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2456 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2457 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2458 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2460 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2462 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2464 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2465 silently ignoring one of them.
2467 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2468 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2469 containing this change was 5.92.
2471 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2472 automatically newline terminated.
2474 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2475 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2476 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2477 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2480 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2481 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2482 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2485 ** Scheduled for removal
2487 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2488 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2490 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2491 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2492 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2493 command to unlink a directory.
2495 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2496 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2497 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2498 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2502 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2503 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2504 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2505 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2506 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2507 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2511 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2512 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2514 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2516 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2517 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2518 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2520 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2521 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2524 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2525 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2527 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2528 list directories before files.
2530 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2531 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2532 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2533 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2536 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2538 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2540 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2541 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2542 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2544 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2545 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2549 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2550 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2551 usually printing nothing.
2553 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2555 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2556 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2557 them with hard-linked directories.
2559 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2560 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2561 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2563 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2564 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2565 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2567 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2570 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2571 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2573 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2574 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2576 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2577 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2579 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2580 all command-line arguments.
2582 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2584 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2586 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2587 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2589 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2591 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2592 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2593 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2594 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2595 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2597 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2598 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2600 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2601 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2602 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2603 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2605 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2607 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2611 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2612 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2614 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2615 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2617 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2618 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2620 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2621 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2623 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2624 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2626 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2628 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2629 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2630 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2633 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2635 ** Build-related bug fixes
2637 installing .mo files would fail
2640 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2644 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2646 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2649 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2653 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2654 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2658 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2660 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2661 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2663 ** Deprecated options
2665 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2666 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2668 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2672 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2674 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2675 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2676 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2677 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2679 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2682 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2688 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2693 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2695 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2697 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2698 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2699 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2701 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2702 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2703 problematic usages. These include:
2705 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2706 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2707 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2708 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2709 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2710 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2711 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2712 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2713 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2715 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2716 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2718 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2719 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2720 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2721 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2723 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2724 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2725 between binary and text files.
2727 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2731 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2735 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2736 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2738 head tac tail tee tr
2739 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2741 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2742 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2744 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2745 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2746 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2748 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2750 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2752 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2753 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2754 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2758 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2760 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2761 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2763 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2764 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2765 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2769 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2770 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2774 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2775 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2776 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2780 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2781 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2785 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2787 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2789 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2793 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2794 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2795 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2797 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2798 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2799 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2800 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2801 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2803 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2807 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2808 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2809 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2811 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2813 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2814 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2815 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2816 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2818 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2820 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2821 rather than silently wrapping around.
2823 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2824 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2826 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2827 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2829 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2830 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2831 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2832 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2834 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2836 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2838 ** Improved robustness
2840 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2841 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2842 no matter how large the result.
2844 ** Improved portability
2846 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2847 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2849 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2851 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2852 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2853 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2855 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2856 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2860 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2861 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2863 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2865 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2866 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2867 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2868 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2870 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2871 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2873 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2874 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2875 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2877 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2879 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2880 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2882 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2883 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2885 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2887 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2888 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2890 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2891 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2893 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2894 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2895 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2897 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2899 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2901 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2905 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2907 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2908 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2909 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2911 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2912 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2914 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2915 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2916 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2918 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2919 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2921 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2922 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2923 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2924 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2926 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2927 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2929 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2930 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2931 the file system does not support it.
2933 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2935 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2936 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2938 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2940 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2941 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2943 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2944 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2945 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2946 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2948 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2949 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2952 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2953 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2954 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2955 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2957 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2958 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2959 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2960 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2962 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2963 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2965 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2967 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2968 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2969 reporting incorrect results.
2973 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2974 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2976 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2979 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2981 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2982 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2984 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2985 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2987 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2990 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2991 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2992 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2993 the file name does not look like a page range.
2995 printf has several changes:
2997 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2998 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3000 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3001 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3002 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3004 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3005 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3008 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3009 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3011 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3012 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3014 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3016 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3017 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3019 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3021 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3023 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3024 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3025 when first encountering the directory.
3029 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3030 output; POSIX requires this.
3032 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3033 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3035 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3037 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3038 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3040 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3041 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3043 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3044 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3045 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3046 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3047 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3048 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3049 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3051 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3052 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3053 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3055 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3056 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3058 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3060 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3062 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3063 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3064 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3065 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3067 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3071 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3072 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3073 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3074 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3075 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3077 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3078 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3079 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3081 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3082 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3084 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3085 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3087 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3088 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3089 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3090 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3091 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3093 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3094 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3096 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3097 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3099 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3101 nocreat do not create the output file
3102 excl fail if the output file already exists
3103 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3104 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3106 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3108 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3109 direct use direct I/O for data
3110 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3111 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3112 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3113 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3114 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3116 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3118 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3119 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3122 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3123 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3124 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3125 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3126 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3127 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3129 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3130 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3132 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3135 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3137 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3139 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3140 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3142 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3143 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3144 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3146 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3147 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3148 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3150 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3152 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3153 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3155 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3156 for compatibility with bash.
3158 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3160 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3161 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3162 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3163 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3165 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3166 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3168 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3169 ls supports TABSIZE.
3170 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3171 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3172 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3174 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3177 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3179 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3180 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3181 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3182 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3183 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3184 an offset, not as a file name.
3186 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3187 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3189 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3190 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3192 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3193 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3195 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3196 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3197 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3199 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3200 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3202 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3203 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3207 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3209 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3211 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3215 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3216 or more arguments between partitions.
3218 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3219 holes in the destination.
3221 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3222 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3223 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3224 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3225 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3226 terminates immediately.
3228 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3230 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3232 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3233 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3234 not the empty string.
3236 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3237 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3241 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3242 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3243 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3246 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3253 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3257 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3258 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3260 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3261 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3263 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3264 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3265 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3268 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3272 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3273 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3275 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3276 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3278 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3279 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3280 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3282 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3284 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3287 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3289 ** Configuration option
3291 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3292 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3296 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3297 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3301 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3302 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3303 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3306 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3307 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3308 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3309 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3310 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3311 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3312 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3315 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3319 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3320 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3321 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3323 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3324 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3326 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3328 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3329 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3330 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3331 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3333 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3335 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3336 not just the ones that reference directories
3338 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3339 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3341 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3342 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3343 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3345 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3346 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3347 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3348 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3349 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3350 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3352 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3357 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3358 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3360 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3362 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3364 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3366 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3367 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3369 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3370 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3372 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3374 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3378 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3380 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3382 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3383 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3384 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3385 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3386 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3388 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3389 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3391 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3392 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3394 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3395 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3397 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3398 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3399 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3403 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3404 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3405 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3406 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3407 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3408 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3409 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3410 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3411 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3412 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3413 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3414 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3415 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3416 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3418 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3420 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3421 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3423 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3425 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3427 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3428 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3430 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3432 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3433 without a trailing newline.
3435 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3436 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3438 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3441 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3445 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3447 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3449 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3450 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3451 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3452 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3454 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3456 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3457 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3458 be printed without leading spaces.
3460 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3461 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3466 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3467 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3468 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3470 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3472 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3473 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3475 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3476 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3478 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3479 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3481 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3483 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3485 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3487 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3488 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3490 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3492 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3494 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3495 byte offsets are specified.
3498 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3501 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3504 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3505 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3506 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3507 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3508 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3509 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3510 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3511 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3512 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3513 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3514 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3515 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3516 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3517 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3518 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3519 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3520 directory where M has write access.
3521 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3522 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3523 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3526 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3527 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3528 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3529 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3530 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3531 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3532 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3533 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3534 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3535 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3536 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3537 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3538 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3539 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3540 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3541 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3542 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3543 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3544 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3545 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3546 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3547 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3548 appeared one additional time.
3550 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3551 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3552 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3553 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3556 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3557 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3558 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3559 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3560 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3561 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3562 if there were more than 338.
3564 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3565 - false --help now exits nonzero
3568 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3569 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3570 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3571 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3574 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3575 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3576 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3577 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3578 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3581 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3582 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3583 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3584 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3585 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3586 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3587 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3590 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3591 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3592 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3593 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3594 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3595 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3597 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3598 under certain unusual conditions
3599 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3600 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3603 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3604 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3605 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3606 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3607 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3608 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3609 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3610 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3611 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3612 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3613 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3614 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3615 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3616 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3617 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3618 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3621 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3622 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3625 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3626 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3627 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3628 involving hard-linked directories
3629 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3630 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3631 character-special and block files
3634 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3635 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3636 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3637 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3638 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3639 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3640 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3641 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3642 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3644 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3645 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3646 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3647 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3648 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3649 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3650 specified on the command line.
3651 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3652 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3653 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3654 the first file untouched.
3655 * readlink: new program
3656 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3657 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3658 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3659 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3660 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3661 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3664 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3665 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3666 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3667 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3668 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3669 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3670 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3671 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3672 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3673 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3674 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3675 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3677 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3678 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3679 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3681 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3682 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3683 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3684 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3685 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3686 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3687 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3688 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3691 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3692 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3695 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3696 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3697 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3698 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3699 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3700 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3701 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3704 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3705 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3707 ========================================================================
3708 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3709 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3712 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3714 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3715 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3716 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3717 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3718 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3719 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3720 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3721 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3722 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3723 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3724 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3725 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3727 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3728 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3729 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3730 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3732 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3735 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3737 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3738 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3739 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3740 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3741 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3742 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3743 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3746 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3747 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3748 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3749 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3750 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3751 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3752 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3753 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3754 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3755 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3756 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3757 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3758 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3759 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3760 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3761 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3763 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3764 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3766 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3767 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3768 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3769 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3770 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3771 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3773 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3774 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3775 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3776 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3777 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3778 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3779 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3781 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3782 the source files in the following example:
3783 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3784 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3785 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3786 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3787 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3788 links between source files with --preserve=links
3789 * cp accepts new options:
3790 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3791 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3792 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3793 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3794 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3795 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3796 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3797 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3798 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3800 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3801 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3802 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3803 even though it's older than dest.
3804 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3805 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3806 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3807 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3808 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3810 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3811 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3812 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3813 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3814 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3815 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3816 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3818 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3819 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3820 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3822 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3823 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3824 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3825 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3826 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3827 This is the default.
3829 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3830 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3831 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3832 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3833 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3835 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3838 ========================================================================
3839 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3840 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3843 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3844 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3846 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3847 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3848 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3849 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3850 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3852 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3853 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3854 that specifies a non-directory
3857 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3858 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3859 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3860 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3861 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3862 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3863 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3864 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3865 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3866 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3867 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3868 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3869 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3870 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3871 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3872 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3873 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3874 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3875 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3876 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3877 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3878 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3879 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3880 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3882 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3883 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3884 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3886 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3888 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3889 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3891 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3892 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3893 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3894 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3895 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3897 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3898 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3899 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3900 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3901 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3903 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3905 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3906 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3907 * still more portability fixes
3908 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3909 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3911 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3913 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3915 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3917 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3918 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3919 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3920 there is any time remaining
3921 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3923 ========================================================================
3924 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3925 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3927 This package began as the union of the following:
3928 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3930 ========================================================================
3932 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3934 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3935 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3936 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3937 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3938 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3939 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.