1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
9 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
10 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
11 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
15 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
16 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
18 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
19 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
20 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. Also affected due to their use
21 of canonicalize_* functions: df, stat, readlink.
23 ** Changes in behavior
25 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
26 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
27 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
31 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
32 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
33 only .tar.xz files is enough.
36 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
40 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
41 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
42 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
44 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
45 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
47 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
48 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
49 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
50 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
51 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
53 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
54 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
55 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
56 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
57 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
58 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
59 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
60 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
62 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
63 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
65 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
66 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
68 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
71 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
72 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
73 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
75 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
76 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
77 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
80 ** Changes in behavior
82 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
83 when -v or -c specified.
85 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
86 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
90 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
91 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
92 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
93 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
94 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
96 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
97 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
98 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
100 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
101 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
102 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
103 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
104 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
105 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
106 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
108 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
109 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
110 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
114 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
115 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
117 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
120 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
121 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
123 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
124 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
126 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
127 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
129 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
131 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
135 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
136 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
138 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
141 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
145 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
146 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
148 ** Changes in behavior
150 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
151 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
152 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
153 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
154 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
155 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
157 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
158 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
159 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
163 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
166 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
170 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
171 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
174 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
175 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
178 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
179 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
182 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
185 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
188 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
191 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
196 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
197 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
198 processed portion thereof.
200 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
201 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
203 ** Changes in behavior
205 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
206 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
207 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
209 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
210 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
211 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
213 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
214 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
216 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
217 Use --preserve-context instead.
219 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
226 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
227 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
228 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
229 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
232 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
233 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
235 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
236 reject file names invalid for that file system.
238 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
243 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
244 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
245 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
246 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
247 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
248 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
249 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
250 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
252 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
253 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
254 the same number of fields are output for each line.
256 ** Changes in behavior
258 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
259 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
260 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
267 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
268 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
272 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
276 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
277 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
279 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
280 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
282 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
283 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
285 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
286 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
287 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
288 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
290 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
291 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
293 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
294 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
295 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
297 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
299 ** Changes in behavior
301 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
302 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
303 to the number of available processors.
307 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
310 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
314 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
315 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
316 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
317 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
319 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
320 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
321 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
323 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
324 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
326 ** Changes in behavior
328 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
329 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
331 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
332 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
333 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
334 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
335 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
336 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
338 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
339 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
340 the same way as the others.
343 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
347 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
348 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
349 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
351 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
352 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
354 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
355 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
356 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
358 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
361 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
364 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
365 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
366 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
368 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
369 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
370 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
371 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
375 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
376 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
378 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
381 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
382 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
384 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
386 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
387 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
388 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
390 ** Changes in behavior
392 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
393 rather than its aliased target.
395 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
396 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
397 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
399 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
400 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
401 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
402 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
403 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
404 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
405 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
406 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
408 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
410 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
412 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
413 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
416 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
417 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
418 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
419 control like taskset for example.
421 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
423 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
424 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
425 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
426 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
427 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
428 includes %C when context information is available.
430 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
431 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
432 rather than a file system attribute.
434 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
435 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
436 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
437 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
439 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
440 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
441 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
443 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
444 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
445 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
448 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
452 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
455 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
457 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
458 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
460 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
461 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
462 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
463 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
465 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
466 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
471 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
472 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
474 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
475 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
476 duration after the initial signal was sent.
478 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
479 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
480 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
481 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
482 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
483 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
484 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
485 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
486 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
488 ** Changes in behavior
490 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
491 sequence when it would be a no-op.
493 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
494 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
497 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
501 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
502 of available processors, which may not have been the case
503 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
508 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
509 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
511 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
512 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
513 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
514 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
516 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
517 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
518 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
521 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
525 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
526 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
529 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
530 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
531 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
533 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
536 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
537 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
538 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
541 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
542 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
545 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
546 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
547 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
550 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
551 renamed-aside and then recreated.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
554 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
555 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
556 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
559 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
560 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
563 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
564 processes will not intersperse their output.
565 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
568 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
572 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
575 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
576 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
578 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
579 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
580 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
581 the presence of the empty string argument.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
584 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
585 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
586 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
587 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
589 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
592 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
593 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
594 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
596 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
597 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
598 and with a malicious user on the same system
599 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
603 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
607 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
608 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
609 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
611 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
612 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
613 offending directory and all "contents."
615 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
616 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
617 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
619 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
620 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
621 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
623 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
624 processes will not intersperse their output.
625 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
626 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
628 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
629 output the name of the file to stdout.
630 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
632 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
633 call fails with errno == EACCES.
634 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
636 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
637 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
640 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
641 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
642 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
644 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
645 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
646 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
647 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
648 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
649 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
651 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
652 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
653 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
654 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
656 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
657 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
659 ** Changes in behavior
661 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
662 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
663 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
664 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
665 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
667 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
668 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
669 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
670 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
672 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
674 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
675 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
676 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
677 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
678 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
682 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
686 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
687 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
689 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
690 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
692 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
693 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
694 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
696 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
697 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
700 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
704 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
705 when the source file doesn't have write access.
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
708 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
709 to accommodate leap seconds.
710 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
712 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
713 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
716 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
718 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
719 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
720 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
722 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
723 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
724 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
725 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
726 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
730 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
731 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
732 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
733 directory or a symlink to a directory.
735 ** Changes in behavior
737 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
738 environment variable is set.
740 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
741 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
742 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
746 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
747 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
748 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
749 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
751 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
752 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
753 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
754 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
758 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
759 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
760 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
762 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
763 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
764 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
765 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
766 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
767 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
770 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
771 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
774 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
778 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
779 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
780 and libraries tested at configure time.
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
783 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
786 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
789 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
790 printing a summary to stderr.
791 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
793 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
794 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
795 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
797 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
798 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
800 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
801 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
802 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
803 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
805 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
806 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
807 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
808 which is relatively unusual.
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
811 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
812 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
813 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
814 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
815 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
816 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
817 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
821 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
822 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
823 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
824 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
825 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
829 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
830 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
832 ** Changes in behavior
834 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
835 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
836 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
837 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
838 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
841 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
845 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
846 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
848 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
849 before data copying has started.
851 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
852 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
854 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
855 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
856 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
857 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
859 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
860 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
861 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
862 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
864 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
869 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
870 for its standard streams.
872 ** Changes in behavior
874 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
875 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
876 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
877 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
878 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
879 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
881 ** Deprecated options
883 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
884 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
888 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
890 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
891 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
894 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
896 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
897 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
899 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
900 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
903 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
907 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
908 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
909 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
910 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
912 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
913 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
914 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
915 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
916 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
921 make check: two tests have been corrected
925 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
926 inherited from gnulib.
929 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
933 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
934 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
935 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
936 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
938 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
939 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
941 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
943 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
944 systems without xattr support.
946 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
947 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
948 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
950 ** Changes in behavior
952 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
953 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
954 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
955 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
957 ** Improved robustness
959 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
960 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
961 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
962 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
963 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
964 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
965 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
966 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
967 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
971 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
972 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
974 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
975 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
976 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
977 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
978 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
981 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
985 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
986 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
987 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
991 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
992 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
993 data was read, or on process exit.
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
996 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
997 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
998 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
999 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1001 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1002 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1003 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1006 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1007 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1009 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1010 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1012 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1013 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1014 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1016 ** Changes in behavior
1018 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1019 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1020 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1022 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1023 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1025 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1026 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1027 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1030 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1034 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1036 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1037 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1038 install: Never copies xattrs
1040 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1041 from overwriting any existing destination file
1043 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1044 mode where this feature is available.
1046 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1047 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1048 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1049 do not modify the destination at all.
1051 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1053 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1057 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1060 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1062 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1063 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1065 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1066 processing the first file name
1068 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1069 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1070 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1071 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1073 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1074 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1076 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1077 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1080 ** Changes in behavior
1082 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1083 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1085 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1086 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1087 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1089 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1090 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1092 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1094 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1095 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1096 is still marked with a '+'.
1099 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1103 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1104 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1108 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1109 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1110 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1111 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1112 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1113 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1115 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1116 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1118 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1119 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1121 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1123 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1124 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1125 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1127 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1128 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1130 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1131 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1132 used to factor large numbers.
1134 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1137 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1139 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1141 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1142 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1144 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1145 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1146 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1147 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1149 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1150 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1151 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1153 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1154 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1158 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1160 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1161 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1163 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1164 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1166 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1168 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1169 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1173 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1174 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1175 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1177 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1179 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1180 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1181 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1183 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1184 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1185 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1187 ** Changes in behavior
1189 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1190 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1193 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1197 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1198 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1199 'futimens' system calls.
1203 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1205 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1206 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1207 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1209 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1210 with no USERNAME argument.
1212 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1213 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1214 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1216 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1217 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1218 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1219 number of fields for some inputs.
1221 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1222 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1224 ** Changes in behavior
1226 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1227 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1230 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1234 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1236 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1237 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1238 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1239 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1241 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1242 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1244 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1245 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1247 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1248 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1250 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1251 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1252 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1255 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1256 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1257 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1258 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1259 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1260 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1262 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1263 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1265 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1266 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1267 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1269 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1270 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1272 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1273 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1275 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1276 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1277 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1278 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1280 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1281 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1283 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1284 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1286 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1287 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1292 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1293 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1295 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1296 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1297 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1298 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1302 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1303 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1305 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1307 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1311 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1312 which have negative errno values.
1316 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1320 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1324 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1325 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1328 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1332 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1333 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1334 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1336 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1337 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1338 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1339 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1343 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1344 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1345 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1346 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1349 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1353 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1355 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1356 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1357 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1360 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1364 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1365 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1367 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1369 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1371 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1373 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1377 ** Changes in behavior
1379 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1380 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1382 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1383 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1385 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1386 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1387 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1391 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1392 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1393 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1394 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1395 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1396 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1397 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1398 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1399 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1400 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1401 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1403 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1404 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1405 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1408 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1411 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1412 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1413 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1415 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1416 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1417 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1420 ** New build options
1422 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1423 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1424 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1425 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1427 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1428 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1429 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1430 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1431 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1432 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1433 of "make check" fail.
1435 ** Remove deprecated options
1437 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1438 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1439 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1440 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1441 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1443 ** Improved robustness
1445 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1446 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1447 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1448 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1449 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1450 loss of the contents of a/f.
1452 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1453 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1457 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1458 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1459 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1461 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1462 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1463 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1464 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1466 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1467 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1468 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1469 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1470 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1471 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1472 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1473 destination is a symlink.
1475 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1477 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1478 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1480 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1481 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1483 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1485 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1486 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1488 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1489 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1491 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1494 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1495 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1497 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1498 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1500 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1501 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1502 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1503 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1505 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1506 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1507 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1509 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1510 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1511 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1513 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1514 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1515 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1516 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1518 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1519 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1520 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1522 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1523 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1525 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1526 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1528 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1530 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1531 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1532 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1534 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1535 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1537 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1538 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1540 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1541 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1543 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1544 [present in the original version]
1547 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1551 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1553 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1554 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1555 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1557 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1558 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1560 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1564 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1565 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1567 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1568 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1570 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1571 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1573 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1574 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1575 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1576 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1577 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1578 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1580 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1581 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1584 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1585 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1587 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1590 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1591 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1592 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1594 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1595 directory is unreadable.
1597 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1598 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1599 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1601 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1602 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1603 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1604 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1605 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1608 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1609 Before it would print nothing.
1611 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1613 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1614 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1615 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1616 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1617 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1618 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1619 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1620 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1622 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1626 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1627 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1628 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1630 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1631 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1632 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1633 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1636 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1640 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1641 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1642 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1643 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1644 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1645 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1646 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1648 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1649 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1650 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1651 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1652 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1653 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1654 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1655 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1657 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1658 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1659 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1662 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1666 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1667 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1669 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1670 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1671 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1673 ** Improved robustness
1675 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1676 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1677 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1680 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1684 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1685 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1686 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1687 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1688 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1690 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1694 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1697 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1701 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1702 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1703 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1704 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1706 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1707 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1709 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1710 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1711 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1714 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1716 ** Improved robustness
1718 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1719 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1721 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1722 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1723 or NFS-mounted partition.
1725 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1726 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1730 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1731 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1732 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1733 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1734 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1735 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1737 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1738 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1740 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1741 or neglect to report file removal.
1743 For the "groups" command:
1745 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1746 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1748 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1750 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1752 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1756 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1757 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1760 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1762 ** Changes in behavior
1764 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1765 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1766 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1767 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1769 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1770 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1771 a final `./' or `../' component.
1773 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1774 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1775 this only for pipes.
1777 ** Infrastructure changes
1779 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1780 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1781 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1782 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1786 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1787 name is "." or "..".
1789 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1790 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1791 dirent.d_type support.
1793 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1794 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1796 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1797 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1798 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1799 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1802 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1804 ** Changes in behavior
1806 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1810 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1811 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1815 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1816 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1817 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1819 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1820 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1822 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1823 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1825 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1827 ** Improved robustness
1829 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1830 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1831 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1833 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1834 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1837 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1838 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1840 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1841 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1843 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1844 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1846 ** Changes in behavior
1848 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1849 where the two are distinct.
1851 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1852 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1853 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1854 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1855 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1856 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1857 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1858 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1859 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1860 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1861 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1862 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1863 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1864 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1865 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1866 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1867 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1869 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1870 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1871 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1873 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1874 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1875 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1876 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1879 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1880 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1884 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1885 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1886 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1887 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1889 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1890 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1891 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1893 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1894 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1895 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1896 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1897 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1900 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1901 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1903 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1904 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1905 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1906 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1908 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1909 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1910 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1912 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1913 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1914 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1915 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1917 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1918 and sticky) with the -m option.
1920 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1921 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1922 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1923 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1924 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1926 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1927 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1929 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1933 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1934 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1935 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1936 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1938 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1940 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1942 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1943 silently ignoring one of them.
1945 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1946 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1947 containing this change was 5.92.
1949 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1950 automatically newline terminated.
1952 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1953 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1954 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1955 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1958 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1959 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1960 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1963 ** Scheduled for removal
1965 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1966 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1968 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1969 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1970 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1971 command to unlink a directory.
1973 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1974 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1975 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1976 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1980 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1981 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1982 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1983 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1984 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1985 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1989 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1990 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1992 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1994 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1995 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1996 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1998 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1999 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2002 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2003 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2005 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2006 list directories before files.
2008 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2009 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2010 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2011 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2014 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2016 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2018 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2019 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2020 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2022 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2023 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2027 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2028 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2029 usually printing nothing.
2031 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2033 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2034 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2035 them with hard-linked directories.
2037 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2038 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2039 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2041 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2042 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2043 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2045 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2048 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2049 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2051 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2052 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2054 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2055 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2057 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2058 all command-line arguments.
2060 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2062 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2064 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2065 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2067 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2069 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2070 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2071 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2072 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2073 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2075 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2076 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2078 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2079 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2080 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2081 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2083 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2085 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2089 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2090 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2092 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2093 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2095 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2096 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2098 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2099 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2101 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2102 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2104 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2106 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2107 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2108 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2111 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2113 ** Build-related bug fixes
2115 installing .mo files would fail
2118 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2122 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2124 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2127 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2131 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2132 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2136 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2138 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2139 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2141 ** Deprecated options
2143 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2144 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2146 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2150 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2152 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2153 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2154 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2155 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2157 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2160 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2166 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2171 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2173 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2175 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2176 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2177 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2179 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2180 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2181 problematic usages. These include:
2183 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2184 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2185 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2186 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2187 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2188 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2189 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2190 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2191 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2193 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2194 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2196 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2197 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2198 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2199 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2201 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2202 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2203 between binary and text files.
2205 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2209 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2213 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2214 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2216 head tac tail tee tr
2217 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2219 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2220 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2222 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2223 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2224 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2226 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2228 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2230 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2231 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2232 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2236 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2238 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2239 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2241 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2242 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2243 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2247 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2248 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2252 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2253 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2254 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2258 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2259 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2263 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2265 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2267 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2271 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2272 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2273 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2275 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2276 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2277 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2278 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2279 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2281 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2285 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2286 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2287 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2289 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2291 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2292 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2293 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2294 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2296 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2298 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2299 rather than silently wrapping around.
2301 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2302 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2304 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2305 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2307 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2308 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2309 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2310 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2312 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2314 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2316 ** Improved robustness
2318 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2319 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2320 no matter how large the result.
2322 ** Improved portability
2324 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2325 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2327 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2329 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2330 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2331 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2333 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2334 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2338 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2339 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2341 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2343 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2344 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2345 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2346 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2348 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2349 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2351 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2352 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2353 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2355 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2357 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2358 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2360 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2361 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2363 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2365 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2366 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2368 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2369 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2371 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2372 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2373 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2375 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2377 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2379 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2383 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2385 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2386 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2387 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2389 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2390 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2392 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2393 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2394 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2396 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2397 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2399 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2400 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2401 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2402 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2404 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2405 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2407 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2408 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2409 the file system does not support it.
2411 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2413 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2414 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2416 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2418 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2419 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2421 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2422 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2423 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2424 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2426 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2427 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2430 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2431 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2432 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2433 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2435 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2436 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2437 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2438 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2440 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2441 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2443 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2445 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2446 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2447 reporting incorrect results.
2451 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2452 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2454 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2457 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2459 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2460 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2462 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2463 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2465 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2468 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2469 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2470 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2471 the file name does not look like a page range.
2473 printf has several changes:
2475 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2476 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2478 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2479 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2480 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2482 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2483 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2486 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2487 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2489 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2490 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2492 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2494 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2495 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2497 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2499 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2501 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2502 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2503 when first encountering the directory.
2507 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2508 output; POSIX requires this.
2510 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2511 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2513 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2515 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2516 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2518 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2519 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2521 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2522 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2523 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2524 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2525 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2526 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2527 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2529 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2530 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2531 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2533 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2534 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2536 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2538 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2540 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2541 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2542 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2543 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2545 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2549 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2550 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2551 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2552 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2553 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2555 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2556 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2557 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2559 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2560 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2562 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2563 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2565 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2566 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2567 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2568 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2569 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2571 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2572 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2574 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2575 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2577 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2579 nocreat do not create the output file
2580 excl fail if the output file already exists
2581 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2582 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2584 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2586 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2587 direct use direct I/O for data
2588 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2589 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2590 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2591 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2592 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2594 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2596 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2597 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2600 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2601 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2602 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2603 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2604 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2605 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2607 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2608 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2610 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2613 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2615 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2617 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2618 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2620 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2621 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2622 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2624 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2625 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2626 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2628 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2630 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2631 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2633 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2634 for compatibility with bash.
2636 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2638 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2639 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2640 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2641 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2643 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2644 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2646 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2647 ls supports TABSIZE.
2648 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2649 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2650 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2652 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2655 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2657 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2658 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2659 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2660 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2661 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2662 an offset, not as a file name.
2664 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2665 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2667 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2668 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2670 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2671 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2673 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2674 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2675 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2677 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2678 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2680 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2681 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2685 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2687 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2689 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2693 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2694 or more arguments between partitions.
2696 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2697 holes in the destination.
2699 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2700 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2701 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2702 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2703 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2704 terminates immediately.
2706 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2708 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2710 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2711 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2712 not the empty string.
2714 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2715 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2719 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2720 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2721 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2724 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2731 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2735 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2736 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2738 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2739 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2741 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2742 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2743 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2746 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2750 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2751 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2753 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2754 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2756 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2757 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2758 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2760 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2762 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2765 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2767 ** Configuration option
2769 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2770 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2774 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2775 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2779 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2780 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2781 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2784 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2785 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2786 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2787 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2788 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2789 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2790 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2793 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2797 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2798 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2799 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2801 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2802 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2804 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2806 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2807 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2808 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2809 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2811 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2813 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2814 not just the ones that reference directories
2816 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2817 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2819 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2820 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2821 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2823 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2824 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2825 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2826 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2827 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2828 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2830 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2835 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2836 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2838 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2840 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2842 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2844 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2845 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2847 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2848 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2850 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2852 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2856 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2858 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2860 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2861 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2862 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2863 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2864 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2866 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2867 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2869 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2870 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2872 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2873 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2875 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2876 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2877 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2881 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2882 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2883 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2884 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2885 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2886 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2887 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2888 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2889 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2890 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2891 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2892 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2893 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2894 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2896 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2898 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2899 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2901 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2903 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2905 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2906 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2908 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2910 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2911 without a trailing newline.
2913 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2914 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2916 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2919 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2923 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2925 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2927 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2928 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2929 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2930 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2932 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2934 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2935 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2936 be printed without leading spaces.
2938 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2939 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2944 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2945 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2946 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2948 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2950 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2951 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2953 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2954 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2956 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2957 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2959 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2961 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2963 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2965 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2966 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2968 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2970 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2972 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2973 byte offsets are specified.
2976 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2979 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2982 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2983 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2984 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2985 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2986 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2987 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2988 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2989 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2990 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2991 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2992 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2993 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2994 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2995 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2996 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2997 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2998 directory where M has write access.
2999 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3000 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3001 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3004 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3005 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3006 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3007 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3008 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3009 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3010 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3011 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3012 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3013 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3014 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3015 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3016 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3017 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3018 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3019 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3020 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3021 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3022 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3023 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3024 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3025 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3026 appeared one additional time.
3028 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3029 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3030 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3031 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3034 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3035 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3036 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3037 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3038 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3039 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3040 if there were more than 338.
3042 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3043 - false --help now exits nonzero
3046 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3047 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3048 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3049 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3052 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3053 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3054 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3055 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3056 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3059 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3060 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3061 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3062 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3063 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3064 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3065 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3068 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3069 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3070 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3071 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3072 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3073 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3075 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3076 under certain unusual conditions
3077 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3078 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3081 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3082 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3083 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3084 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3085 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3086 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3087 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3088 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3089 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3090 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3091 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3092 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3093 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3094 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3095 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3096 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3099 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3100 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3103 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3104 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3105 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3106 involving hard-linked directories
3107 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3108 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3109 character-special and block files
3112 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3113 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3114 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3115 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3116 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3117 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3118 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3119 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3120 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3122 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3123 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3124 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3125 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3126 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3127 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3128 specified on the command line.
3129 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3130 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3131 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3132 the first file untouched.
3133 * readlink: new program
3134 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3135 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3136 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3137 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3138 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3139 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3142 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3143 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3144 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3145 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3146 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3147 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3148 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3149 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3150 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3151 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3152 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3153 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3155 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3156 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3157 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3159 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3160 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3161 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3162 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3163 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3164 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3165 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3166 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3169 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3170 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3173 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3174 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3175 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3176 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3177 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3178 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3179 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3182 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3183 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3185 ========================================================================
3186 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3187 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3190 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3192 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3193 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3194 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3195 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3196 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3197 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3198 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3199 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3200 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3201 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3202 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3203 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3205 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3206 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3207 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3208 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3210 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3213 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3215 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3216 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3217 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3218 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3219 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3220 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3221 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3224 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3225 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3226 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3227 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3228 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3229 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3230 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3231 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3232 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3233 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3234 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3235 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3236 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3237 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3238 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3239 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3241 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3242 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3244 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3245 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3246 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3247 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3248 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3249 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3251 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3252 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3253 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3254 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3255 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3256 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3257 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3259 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3260 the source files in the following example:
3261 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3262 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3263 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3264 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3265 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3266 links between source files with --preserve=links
3267 * cp accepts new options:
3268 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3269 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3270 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3271 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3272 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3273 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3274 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3275 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3276 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3278 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3279 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3280 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3281 even though it's older than dest.
3282 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3283 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3284 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3285 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3286 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3288 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3289 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3290 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3291 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3292 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3293 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3294 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3296 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3297 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3298 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3300 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3301 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3302 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3303 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3304 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3305 This is the default.
3307 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3308 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3309 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3310 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3311 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3313 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3316 ========================================================================
3317 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3318 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3321 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3322 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3324 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3325 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3326 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3327 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3328 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3330 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3331 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3332 that specifies a non-directory
3335 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3336 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3337 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3338 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3339 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3340 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3341 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3342 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3343 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3344 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3345 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3346 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3347 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3348 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3349 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3350 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3351 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3352 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3353 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3354 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3355 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3356 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3357 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3358 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3360 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3361 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3362 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3364 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3366 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3367 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3369 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3370 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3371 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3372 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3373 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3375 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3376 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3377 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3378 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3379 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3381 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3383 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3384 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3385 * still more portability fixes
3386 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3387 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3389 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3391 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3393 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3395 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3396 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3397 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3398 there is any time remaining
3399 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3401 ========================================================================
3402 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3403 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3405 This package began as the union of the following:
3406 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3408 ========================================================================
3410 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3412 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3413 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3414 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3415 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3416 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3417 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.