1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
10 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
11 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
12 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
13 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
17 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
18 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
20 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
21 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
22 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
23 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
24 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
25 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
26 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
27 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
28 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
30 ** Changes in behavior
32 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
33 sequence when it would be a no-op.
35 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
36 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
39 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
43 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
44 of available processors, which may not have been the case
45 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
46 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
50 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
51 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
53 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
54 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
55 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
56 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
58 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
59 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
60 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
63 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
67 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
68 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
71 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
72 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
73 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
75 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
78 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
79 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
80 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
83 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
84 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
87 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
88 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
89 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
92 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
93 renamed-aside and then recreated.
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
96 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
97 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
98 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
99 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
101 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
102 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
105 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
106 processes will not intersperse their output.
107 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
114 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
117 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
120 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
121 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
122 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
123 the presence of the empty string argument.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
126 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
127 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
128 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
129 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
131 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
134 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
135 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
136 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
138 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
139 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
140 and with a malicious user on the same system
141 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
149 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
150 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
153 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
154 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
155 offending directory and all "contents."
157 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
158 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
159 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
161 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
162 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
163 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
165 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
166 processes will not intersperse their output.
167 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
170 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
171 output the name of the file to stdout.
172 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
174 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
175 call fails with errno == EACCES.
176 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
178 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
179 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
182 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
183 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
184 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
186 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
187 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
188 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
189 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
190 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
191 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
193 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
194 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
195 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
196 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
198 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
199 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
201 ** Changes in behavior
203 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
204 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
205 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
206 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
207 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
209 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
210 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
211 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
212 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
214 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
216 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
217 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
218 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
219 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
220 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
224 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
228 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
229 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
231 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
232 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
234 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
235 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
236 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
238 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
239 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
242 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
246 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
247 when the source file doesn't have write access.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
250 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
251 to accommodate leap seconds.
252 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
254 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
255 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
256 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
258 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
260 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
261 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
262 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
264 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
265 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
266 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
267 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
268 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
272 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
273 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
274 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
275 directory or a symlink to a directory.
277 ** Changes in behavior
279 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
280 environment variable is set.
282 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
283 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
284 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
288 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
289 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
290 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
291 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
293 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
294 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
295 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
296 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
300 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
301 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
302 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
304 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
305 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
306 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
307 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
308 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
309 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
312 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
313 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
320 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
321 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
322 and libraries tested at configure time.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
325 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
328 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
331 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
332 printing a summary to stderr.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
335 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
336 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
337 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
339 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
342 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
343 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
344 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
345 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
347 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
348 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
349 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
350 which is relatively unusual.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
353 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
354 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
355 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
356 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
357 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
358 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
363 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
364 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
365 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
366 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
367 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
371 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
372 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
374 ** Changes in behavior
376 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
377 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
378 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
379 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
380 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
383 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
387 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
388 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
390 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
391 before data copying has started.
393 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
394 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
396 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
397 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
398 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
399 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
401 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
402 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
403 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
404 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
406 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
411 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
412 for its standard streams.
414 ** Changes in behavior
416 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
417 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
418 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
419 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
420 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
421 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
423 ** Deprecated options
425 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
426 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
430 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
432 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
433 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
436 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
438 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
439 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
441 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
442 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
445 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
449 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
450 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
451 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
452 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
454 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
455 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
456 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
457 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
458 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
463 make check: two tests have been corrected
467 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
468 inherited from gnulib.
471 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
475 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
476 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
477 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
478 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
480 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
481 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
483 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
485 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
486 systems without xattr support.
488 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
489 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
490 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
492 ** Changes in behavior
494 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
495 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
496 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
497 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
499 ** Improved robustness
501 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
502 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
503 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
504 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
505 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
506 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
507 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
508 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
509 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
513 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
514 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
516 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
517 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
518 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
519 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
520 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
523 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
527 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
528 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
529 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
533 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
534 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
535 data was read, or on process exit.
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
538 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
539 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
540 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
543 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
544 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
545 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
548 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
549 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
551 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
554 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
555 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
556 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
558 ** Changes in behavior
560 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
561 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
562 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
564 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
565 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
567 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
568 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
569 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
572 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
576 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
578 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
579 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
580 install: Never copies xattrs
582 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
583 from overwriting any existing destination file
585 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
586 mode where this feature is available.
588 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
589 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
590 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
591 do not modify the destination at all.
593 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
595 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
599 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
602 cp uses much less memory in some situations
604 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
605 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
607 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
608 processing the first file name
610 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
611 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
612 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
613 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
615 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
616 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
618 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
619 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
622 ** Changes in behavior
624 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
625 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
627 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
628 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
629 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
631 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
632 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
634 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
636 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
637 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
638 is still marked with a '+'.
641 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
645 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
646 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
650 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
651 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
652 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
653 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
654 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
655 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
657 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
658 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
660 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
661 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
663 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
665 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
666 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
667 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
669 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
670 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
672 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
673 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
674 used to factor large numbers.
676 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
679 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
681 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
683 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
684 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
686 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
687 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
688 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
689 maximum command-line (argv) length.
691 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
692 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
693 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
695 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
696 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
700 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
702 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
703 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
705 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
706 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
708 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
710 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
711 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
715 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
716 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
717 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
719 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
721 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
722 no matter how many files are in a given directory
724 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
725 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
726 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
728 ** Changes in behavior
730 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
731 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
734 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
738 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
740 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
741 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
742 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
744 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
745 with no USERNAME argument.
747 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
748 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
749 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
751 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
752 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
753 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
754 number of fields for some inputs.
756 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
757 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
759 ** Changes in behavior
761 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
762 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
765 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
769 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
771 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
772 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
773 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
774 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
776 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
777 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
779 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
780 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
782 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
783 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
785 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
786 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
787 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
790 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
791 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
792 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
793 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
794 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
795 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
797 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
798 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
800 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
801 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
802 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
804 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
805 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
807 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
808 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
810 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
811 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
812 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
813 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
815 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
816 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
818 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
819 in more cases when a directory is empty.
821 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
822 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
823 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
827 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
828 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
830 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
831 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
832 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
833 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
837 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
838 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
840 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
842 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
846 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
847 which have negative errno values.
851 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
855 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
859 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
860 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
863 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
867 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
868 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
869 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
871 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
872 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
873 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
874 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
878 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
879 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
880 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
881 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
884 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
888 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
890 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
891 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
892 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
895 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
899 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
900 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
902 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
904 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
906 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
908 ** Programs no longer installed by default
912 ** Changes in behavior
914 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
915 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
917 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
918 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
920 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
921 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
922 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
926 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
927 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
928 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
929 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
930 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
931 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
932 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
933 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
934 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
935 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
936 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
938 The following commands and options now support the standard size
939 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
940 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
943 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
946 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
947 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
948 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
950 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
951 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
952 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
957 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
958 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
959 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
960 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
962 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
963 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
964 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
965 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
966 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
967 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
968 of "make check" fail.
970 ** Remove deprecated options
972 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
973 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
974 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
975 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
976 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
978 ** Improved robustness
980 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
981 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
982 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
983 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
984 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
985 loss of the contents of a/f.
987 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
988 in its 35-colon command-line argument
992 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
993 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
996 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
997 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
998 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
999 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1001 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1002 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1003 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1004 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1005 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1006 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1007 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1008 destination is a symlink.
1010 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1012 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1013 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1015 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1016 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1018 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1020 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1021 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1023 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1024 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1026 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1029 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1030 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1032 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1033 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1035 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1036 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1037 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1038 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1040 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1041 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1042 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1044 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1045 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1046 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1048 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1049 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1050 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1051 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1053 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1054 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1055 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1057 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1058 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1060 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1061 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1063 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1065 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1066 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1067 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1069 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1070 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1072 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1073 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1075 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1076 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1078 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1079 [present in the original version]
1082 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1086 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1088 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1089 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1090 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1092 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1093 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1095 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1099 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1100 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1102 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1103 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1105 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1106 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1108 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1109 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1110 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1111 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1112 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1113 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1115 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1116 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1119 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1120 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1122 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1125 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1126 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1127 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1129 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1130 directory is unreadable.
1132 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1133 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1134 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1136 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1137 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1138 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1139 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1140 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1143 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1144 Before it would print nothing.
1146 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1148 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1149 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1150 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1151 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1152 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1153 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1154 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1155 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1157 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1161 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1162 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1163 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1165 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1166 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1167 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1168 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1171 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1175 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1176 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1177 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1178 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1179 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1180 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1181 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1183 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1184 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1185 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1186 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1187 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1188 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1189 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1190 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1192 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1193 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1194 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1197 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1201 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1202 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1204 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1205 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1206 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1208 ** Improved robustness
1210 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1211 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1212 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1215 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1219 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1220 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1221 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1222 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1223 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1225 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1229 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1232 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1236 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1237 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1238 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1239 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1241 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1242 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1244 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1245 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1246 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1249 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1251 ** Improved robustness
1253 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1254 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1256 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1257 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1258 or NFS-mounted partition.
1260 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1261 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1265 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1266 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1267 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1268 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1269 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1270 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1272 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1273 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1275 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1276 or neglect to report file removal.
1278 For the "groups" command:
1280 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1281 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1283 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1285 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1287 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1291 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1292 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1295 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1297 ** Changes in behavior
1299 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1300 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1301 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1302 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1304 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1305 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1306 a final `./' or `../' component.
1308 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1309 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1310 this only for pipes.
1312 ** Infrastructure changes
1314 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1315 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1316 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1317 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1321 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1322 name is "." or "..".
1324 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1325 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1326 dirent.d_type support.
1328 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1329 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1331 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1332 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1333 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1334 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1337 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1339 ** Changes in behavior
1341 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1345 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1346 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1350 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1351 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1352 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1354 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1355 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1357 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1358 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1360 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1362 ** Improved robustness
1364 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1365 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1366 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1368 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1369 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1372 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1373 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1375 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1376 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1378 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1379 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1381 ** Changes in behavior
1383 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1384 where the two are distinct.
1386 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1387 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1388 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1389 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1390 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1391 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1392 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1393 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1394 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1395 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1396 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1397 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1398 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1399 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1400 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1401 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1402 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1404 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1405 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1406 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1408 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1409 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1410 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1411 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1414 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1415 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1419 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1420 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1421 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1422 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1424 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1425 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1426 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1428 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1429 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1430 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1431 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1432 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1435 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1436 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1438 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1439 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1440 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1441 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1443 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1444 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1445 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1447 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1448 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1449 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1450 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1452 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1453 and sticky) with the -m option.
1455 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1456 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1457 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1458 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1459 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1461 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1462 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1464 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1468 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1469 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1470 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1471 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1473 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1475 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1477 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1478 silently ignoring one of them.
1480 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1481 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1482 containing this change was 5.92.
1484 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1485 automatically newline terminated.
1487 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1488 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1489 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1490 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1493 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1494 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1495 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1498 ** Scheduled for removal
1500 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1501 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1503 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1504 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1505 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1506 command to unlink a directory.
1508 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1509 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1510 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1511 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1515 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1516 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1517 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1518 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1519 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1520 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1524 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1525 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1527 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1529 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1530 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1531 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1533 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1534 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1537 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1538 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1540 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1541 list directories before files.
1543 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1544 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1545 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1546 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1549 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1551 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1553 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1554 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1555 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1557 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1558 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1562 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1563 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1564 usually printing nothing.
1566 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1568 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1569 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1570 them with hard-linked directories.
1572 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1573 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1574 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1576 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1577 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1578 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1580 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1583 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1584 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1586 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1587 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1589 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1590 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1592 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1593 all command-line arguments.
1595 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1597 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1599 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1600 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1602 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1604 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1605 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1606 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1607 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1608 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1610 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1611 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1613 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1614 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1615 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1616 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1618 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1620 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1624 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1625 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1627 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1628 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1630 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1631 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1633 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1634 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1636 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1637 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1639 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1641 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1642 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1643 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1646 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1648 ** Build-related bug fixes
1650 installing .mo files would fail
1653 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1657 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1659 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1662 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1666 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1667 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1671 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1673 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1674 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1676 ** Deprecated options
1678 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1679 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1681 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1685 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1687 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1688 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1689 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1690 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1692 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1695 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1701 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1706 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1708 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1710 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1711 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1712 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1714 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1715 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1716 problematic usages. These include:
1718 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1719 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1720 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1721 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1722 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1723 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1724 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1725 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1726 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1728 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1729 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1731 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1732 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1733 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1734 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1736 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1737 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1738 between binary and text files.
1740 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1744 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1748 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1749 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1751 head tac tail tee tr
1752 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1754 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1755 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1757 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1758 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1759 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1761 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1763 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1765 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1766 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1767 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1771 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1773 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1774 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1776 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1777 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1778 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1782 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1783 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1787 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1788 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1789 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1793 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1794 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1798 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1800 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1802 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1806 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1807 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1808 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1810 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1811 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1812 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1813 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1814 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1816 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1820 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1821 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1822 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1824 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1826 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1827 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1828 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1829 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1831 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1833 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1834 rather than silently wrapping around.
1836 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1837 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1839 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1840 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1842 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1843 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1844 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1845 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1847 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1849 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1851 ** Improved robustness
1853 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1854 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1855 no matter how large the result.
1857 ** Improved portability
1859 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1860 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1862 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1864 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1865 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1866 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1868 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1869 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1873 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1874 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1876 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1878 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1879 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1880 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1881 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1883 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1884 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1886 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1887 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1888 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1890 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1892 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1893 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1895 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1896 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1898 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1900 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1901 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1903 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1904 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1906 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1907 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1908 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1910 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1912 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1914 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1918 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1920 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1921 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1922 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1924 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1925 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1927 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1928 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1929 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1931 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1932 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1934 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1935 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1936 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1937 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1939 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1940 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1942 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1943 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1944 the file system does not support it.
1946 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1948 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1949 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1951 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1953 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1954 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1956 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1957 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1958 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1959 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1961 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1962 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1965 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1966 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1967 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1968 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1970 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1971 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1972 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1973 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1975 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1976 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1978 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1980 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1981 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1982 reporting incorrect results.
1986 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1987 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1989 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1992 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1994 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1995 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1997 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1998 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2000 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2003 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2004 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2005 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2006 the file name does not look like a page range.
2008 printf has several changes:
2010 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2011 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2013 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2014 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2015 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2017 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2018 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2021 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2022 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2024 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2025 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2027 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2029 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2030 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2032 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2034 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2036 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2037 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2038 when first encountering the directory.
2042 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2043 output; POSIX requires this.
2045 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2046 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2048 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2050 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2051 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2053 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2054 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2056 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2057 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2058 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2059 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2060 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2061 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2062 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2064 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2065 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2066 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2068 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2069 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2071 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2073 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2075 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2076 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2077 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2078 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2080 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2084 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2085 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2086 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2087 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2088 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2090 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2091 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2092 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2094 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2095 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2097 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2098 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2100 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2101 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2102 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2103 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2104 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2106 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2107 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2109 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2110 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2112 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2114 nocreat do not create the output file
2115 excl fail if the output file already exists
2116 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2117 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2119 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2121 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2122 direct use direct I/O for data
2123 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2124 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2125 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2126 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2127 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2129 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2131 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2132 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2135 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2136 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2137 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2138 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2139 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2140 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2142 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2143 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2145 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2148 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2150 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2152 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2153 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2155 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2156 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2157 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2159 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2160 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2161 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2163 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2165 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2166 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2168 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2169 for compatibility with bash.
2171 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2173 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2174 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2175 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2176 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2178 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2179 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2181 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2182 ls supports TABSIZE.
2183 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2184 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2185 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2187 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2190 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2192 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2193 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2194 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2195 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2196 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2197 an offset, not as a file name.
2199 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2200 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2202 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2203 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2205 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2206 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2208 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2209 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2210 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2212 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2213 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2215 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2216 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2220 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2222 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2224 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2228 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2229 or more arguments between partitions.
2231 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2232 holes in the destination.
2234 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2235 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2236 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2237 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2238 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2239 terminates immediately.
2241 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2243 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2245 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2246 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2247 not the empty string.
2249 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2250 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2254 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2255 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2256 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2259 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2266 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2270 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2271 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2273 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2274 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2276 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2277 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2278 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2281 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2285 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2286 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2288 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2289 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2291 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2292 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2293 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2295 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2297 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2300 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2302 ** Configuration option
2304 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2305 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2309 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2310 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2314 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2315 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2316 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2319 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2320 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2321 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2322 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2323 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2324 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2325 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2328 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2332 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2333 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2334 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2336 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2337 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2339 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2341 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2342 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2343 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2344 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2346 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2348 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2349 not just the ones that reference directories
2351 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2352 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2354 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2355 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2356 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2358 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2359 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2360 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2361 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2362 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2363 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2365 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2370 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2371 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2373 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2375 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2377 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2379 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2380 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2382 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2383 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2385 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2387 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2391 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2393 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2395 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2396 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2397 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2398 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2399 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2401 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2402 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2404 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2405 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2407 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2408 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2410 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2411 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2412 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2416 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2417 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2418 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2419 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2420 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2421 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2422 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2423 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2424 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2425 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2426 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2427 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2428 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2429 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2431 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2433 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2434 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2436 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2438 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2440 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2441 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2443 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2445 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2446 without a trailing newline.
2448 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2449 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2451 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2454 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2458 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2460 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2462 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2463 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2464 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2465 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2467 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2469 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2470 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2471 be printed without leading spaces.
2473 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2474 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2479 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2480 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2481 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2483 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2485 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2486 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2488 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2489 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2491 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2492 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2494 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2496 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2498 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2500 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2501 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2503 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2505 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2507 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2508 byte offsets are specified.
2511 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2514 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2517 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2518 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2519 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2520 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2521 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2522 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2523 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2524 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2525 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2526 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2527 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2528 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2529 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2530 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2531 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2532 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2533 directory where M has write access.
2534 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2535 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2536 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2539 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2540 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2541 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2542 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2543 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2544 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2545 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2546 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2547 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2548 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2549 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2550 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2551 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2552 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2553 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2554 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2555 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2556 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2557 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2558 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2559 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2560 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2561 appeared one additional time.
2563 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2564 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2565 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2566 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2569 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2570 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2571 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2572 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2573 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2574 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2575 if there were more than 338.
2577 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2578 - false --help now exits nonzero
2581 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2582 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2583 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2584 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2587 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2588 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2589 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2590 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2591 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2594 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2595 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2596 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2597 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2598 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2599 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2600 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2603 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2604 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2605 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2606 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2607 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2608 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2610 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2611 under certain unusual conditions
2612 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2613 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2616 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2617 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2618 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2619 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2620 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2621 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2622 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2623 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2624 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2625 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2626 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2627 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2628 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2629 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2630 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2631 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2634 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2635 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2638 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2639 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2640 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2641 involving hard-linked directories
2642 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2643 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2644 character-special and block files
2647 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2648 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2649 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2650 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2651 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2652 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2653 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2654 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2655 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2657 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2658 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2659 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2660 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2661 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2662 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2663 specified on the command line.
2664 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2665 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2666 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2667 the first file untouched.
2668 * readlink: new program
2669 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2670 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2671 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2672 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2673 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2674 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2677 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2678 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2679 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2680 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2681 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2682 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2683 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2684 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2685 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2686 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2687 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2688 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2690 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2691 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2692 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2694 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2695 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2696 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2697 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2698 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2699 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2700 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2701 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2704 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2705 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2708 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2709 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2710 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2711 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2712 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2713 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2714 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2717 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2718 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2720 ========================================================================
2721 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2722 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2725 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2727 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2728 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2729 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2730 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2731 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2732 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2733 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2734 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2735 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2736 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2737 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2738 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2740 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2741 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2742 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2743 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2745 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2748 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2750 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2751 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2752 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2753 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2754 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2755 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2756 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2759 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2760 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2761 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2762 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2763 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2764 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2765 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2766 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2767 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2768 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2769 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2770 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2771 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2772 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2773 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2774 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2776 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2777 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2779 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2780 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2781 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2782 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2783 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2784 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2786 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2787 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2788 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2789 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2790 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2791 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2792 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2794 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2795 the source files in the following example:
2796 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2797 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2798 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2799 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2800 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2801 links between source files with --preserve=links
2802 * cp accepts new options:
2803 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2804 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2805 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2806 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2807 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2808 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2809 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2810 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2811 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2813 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2814 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2815 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2816 even though it's older than dest.
2817 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2818 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2819 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2820 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2821 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2823 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2824 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2825 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2826 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2827 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2828 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2829 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2831 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2832 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2833 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2835 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2836 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2837 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2838 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2839 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2840 This is the default.
2842 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2843 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2844 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2845 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2846 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2848 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2851 ========================================================================
2852 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2853 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2856 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2857 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2859 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2860 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2861 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2862 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2863 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2865 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2866 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2867 that specifies a non-directory
2870 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2871 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2872 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2873 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2874 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2875 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2876 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2877 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2878 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2879 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2880 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2881 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2882 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2883 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2884 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2885 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2886 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2887 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2888 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2889 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2890 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2891 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2892 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2893 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2895 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2896 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2897 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2899 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2901 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2902 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2904 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2905 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2906 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2907 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2908 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2910 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2911 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2912 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2913 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2914 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2916 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2918 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2919 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2920 * still more portability fixes
2921 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2922 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2924 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2926 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2928 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2930 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2931 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2932 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2933 there is any time remaining
2934 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2936 ========================================================================
2937 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2938 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2940 This package began as the union of the following:
2941 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2943 ========================================================================
2945 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2947 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2948 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
2949 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2950 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2951 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2952 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.