1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
10 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
11 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
12 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
14 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
17 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
22 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
23 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
25 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
26 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
27 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
28 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
30 ** Changes in behavior
32 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
33 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
34 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
38 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
39 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
40 only .tar.xz files is enough.
43 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
47 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
48 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
49 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
51 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
52 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
54 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
55 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
56 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
57 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
58 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
60 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
61 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
62 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
63 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
64 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
65 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
66 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
67 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
69 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
70 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
72 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
73 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
75 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
78 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
79 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
80 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
82 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
83 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
84 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
87 ** Changes in behavior
89 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
90 when -v or -c specified.
92 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
93 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
97 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
98 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
99 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
100 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
101 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
103 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
104 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
105 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
107 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
108 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
109 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
110 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
111 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
112 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
113 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
115 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
116 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
117 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
121 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
122 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
124 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
127 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
128 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
130 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
131 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
133 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
134 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
136 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
138 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
142 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
143 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
145 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
148 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
152 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
153 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
155 ** Changes in behavior
157 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
158 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
159 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
160 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
161 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
162 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
164 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
165 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
166 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
170 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
173 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
177 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
178 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
181 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
182 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
185 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
186 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
189 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
192 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
195 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
198 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
203 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
204 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
205 processed portion thereof.
207 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
208 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
210 ** Changes in behavior
212 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
213 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
214 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
216 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
217 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
218 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
220 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
221 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
223 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
224 Use --preserve-context instead.
226 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
233 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
234 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
235 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
236 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
237 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
239 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
240 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
242 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
243 reject file names invalid for that file system.
245 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
250 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
251 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
252 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
253 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
254 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
255 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
256 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
257 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
259 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
260 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
261 the same number of fields are output for each line.
263 ** Changes in behavior
265 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
266 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
267 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
270 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
274 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
275 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
279 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
283 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
284 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
286 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
287 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
289 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
290 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
292 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
293 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
294 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
297 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
298 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
300 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
301 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
302 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
304 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
306 ** Changes in behavior
308 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
309 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
310 to the number of available processors.
314 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
317 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
321 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
322 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
323 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
324 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
326 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
327 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
328 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
330 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
331 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
333 ** Changes in behavior
335 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
336 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
338 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
339 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
340 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
341 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
342 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
343 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
345 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
346 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
347 the same way as the others.
350 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
354 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
355 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
356 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
358 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
359 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
361 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
362 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
363 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
365 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
368 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
371 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
372 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
373 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
375 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
376 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
377 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
378 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
382 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
383 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
385 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
388 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
389 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
391 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
393 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
394 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
395 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
397 ** Changes in behavior
399 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
400 rather than its aliased target.
402 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
403 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
404 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
406 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
407 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
408 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
409 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
410 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
411 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
412 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
413 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
415 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
417 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
419 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
420 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
423 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
424 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
425 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
426 control like taskset for example.
428 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
430 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
431 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
432 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
433 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
434 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
435 includes %C when context information is available.
437 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
438 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
439 rather than a file system attribute.
441 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
442 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
443 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
444 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
446 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
447 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
448 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
450 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
451 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
452 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
455 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
459 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
460 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
462 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
464 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
467 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
468 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
469 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
470 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
472 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
473 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
478 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
479 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
481 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
482 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
483 duration after the initial signal was sent.
485 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
486 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
487 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
488 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
489 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
490 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
491 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
492 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
493 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
495 ** Changes in behavior
497 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
498 sequence when it would be a no-op.
500 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
501 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
504 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
508 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
509 of available processors, which may not have been the case
510 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
515 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
516 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
518 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
519 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
520 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
521 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
523 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
524 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
525 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
528 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
532 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
533 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
536 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
537 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
538 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
540 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
543 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
544 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
545 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
548 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
549 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
552 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
553 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
554 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
557 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
558 renamed-aside and then recreated.
559 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
561 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
562 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
563 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
566 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
567 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
570 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
571 processes will not intersperse their output.
572 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
575 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
579 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
582 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
585 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
586 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
587 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
588 the presence of the empty string argument.
589 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
591 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
592 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
593 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
594 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
596 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
597 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
599 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
600 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
601 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
603 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
604 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
605 and with a malicious user on the same system
606 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
610 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
614 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
615 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
618 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
619 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
620 offending directory and all "contents."
622 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
623 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
624 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
626 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
627 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
628 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
630 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
631 processes will not intersperse their output.
632 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
633 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
635 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
636 output the name of the file to stdout.
637 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
639 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
640 call fails with errno == EACCES.
641 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
643 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
644 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
647 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
648 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
649 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
651 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
652 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
653 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
654 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
655 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
656 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
658 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
659 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
660 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
661 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
663 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
664 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
666 ** Changes in behavior
668 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
669 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
670 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
671 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
672 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
674 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
675 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
676 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
677 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
679 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
681 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
682 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
683 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
684 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
685 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
689 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
693 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
694 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
696 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
697 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
699 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
700 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
701 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
703 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
704 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
707 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
711 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
712 when the source file doesn't have write access.
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
715 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
716 to accommodate leap seconds.
717 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
719 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
720 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
723 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
725 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
726 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
727 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
729 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
730 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
731 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
732 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
733 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
737 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
738 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
739 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
740 directory or a symlink to a directory.
742 ** Changes in behavior
744 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
745 environment variable is set.
747 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
748 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
749 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
753 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
754 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
755 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
756 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
758 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
759 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
760 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
761 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
765 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
766 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
767 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
769 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
770 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
771 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
772 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
773 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
774 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
777 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
778 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
781 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
785 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
786 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
787 and libraries tested at configure time.
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
790 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
791 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
793 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
796 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
797 printing a summary to stderr.
798 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
800 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
801 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
802 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
804 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
805 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
807 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
808 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
809 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
810 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
812 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
813 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
814 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
815 which is relatively unusual.
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
818 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
819 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
820 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
821 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
822 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
823 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
828 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
829 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
830 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
831 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
832 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
836 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
837 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
839 ** Changes in behavior
841 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
842 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
843 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
844 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
845 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
848 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
852 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
853 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
855 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
856 before data copying has started.
858 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
859 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
861 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
862 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
863 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
864 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
866 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
867 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
868 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
869 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
871 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
876 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
877 for its standard streams.
879 ** Changes in behavior
881 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
882 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
883 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
884 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
885 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
886 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
888 ** Deprecated options
890 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
891 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
895 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
897 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
898 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
901 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
903 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
904 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
906 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
907 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
910 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
914 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
915 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
916 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
917 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
919 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
920 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
921 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
922 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
923 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
928 make check: two tests have been corrected
932 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
933 inherited from gnulib.
936 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
940 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
941 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
942 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
943 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
945 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
946 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
948 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
950 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
951 systems without xattr support.
953 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
954 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
955 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
957 ** Changes in behavior
959 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
960 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
961 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
962 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
964 ** Improved robustness
966 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
967 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
968 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
969 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
970 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
971 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
972 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
973 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
974 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
978 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
979 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
981 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
982 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
983 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
984 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
985 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
988 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
992 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
993 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
994 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
998 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
999 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1000 data was read, or on process exit.
1001 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1003 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1004 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1005 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1008 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1009 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1010 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1013 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1014 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1016 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1017 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1019 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1020 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1021 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1023 ** Changes in behavior
1025 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1026 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1027 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1029 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1030 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1032 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1033 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1034 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1037 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1041 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1043 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1044 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1045 install: Never copies xattrs
1047 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1048 from overwriting any existing destination file
1050 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1051 mode where this feature is available.
1053 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1054 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1055 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1056 do not modify the destination at all.
1058 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1060 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1064 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1065 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1067 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1069 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1070 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1072 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1073 processing the first file name
1075 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1076 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1077 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1078 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1080 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1081 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1083 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1084 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1087 ** Changes in behavior
1089 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1090 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1092 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1093 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1094 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1096 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1097 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1099 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1101 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1102 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1103 is still marked with a '+'.
1106 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1110 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1111 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1115 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1116 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1117 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1118 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1119 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1120 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1122 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1123 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1125 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1126 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1128 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1130 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1131 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1132 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1134 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1135 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1137 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1138 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1139 used to factor large numbers.
1141 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1144 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1146 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1148 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1149 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1151 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1152 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1153 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1154 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1156 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1157 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1158 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1160 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1161 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1165 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1167 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1168 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1170 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1171 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1173 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1175 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1176 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1180 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1181 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1182 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1184 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1186 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1187 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1188 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1190 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1191 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1192 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1194 ** Changes in behavior
1196 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1197 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1200 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1204 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1205 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1206 'futimens' system calls.
1210 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1212 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1213 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1214 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1216 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1217 with no USERNAME argument.
1219 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1220 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1221 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1223 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1224 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1225 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1226 number of fields for some inputs.
1228 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1229 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1231 ** Changes in behavior
1233 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1234 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1237 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1241 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1243 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1244 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1245 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1246 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1248 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1249 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1251 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1252 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1254 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1255 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1257 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1258 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1259 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1260 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1262 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1263 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1264 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1265 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1266 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1267 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1269 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1270 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1272 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1273 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1274 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1276 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1277 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1279 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1280 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1282 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1283 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1284 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1285 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1287 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1288 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1290 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1291 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1293 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1294 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1295 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1299 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1300 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1302 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1303 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1304 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1305 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1309 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1310 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1312 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1314 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1318 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1319 which have negative errno values.
1323 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1327 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1331 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1335 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1339 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1340 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1343 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1344 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1345 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1346 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1350 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1351 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1352 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1353 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1356 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1360 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1362 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1363 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1367 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1371 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1372 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1374 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1376 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1378 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1380 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1384 ** Changes in behavior
1386 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1387 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1389 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1390 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1392 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1393 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1394 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1398 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1399 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1400 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1401 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1402 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1403 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1404 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1405 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1406 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1407 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1408 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1410 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1411 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1412 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1415 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1418 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1419 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1420 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1422 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1423 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1424 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1427 ** New build options
1429 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1430 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1431 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1432 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1434 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1435 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1436 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1437 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1438 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1439 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1440 of "make check" fail.
1442 ** Remove deprecated options
1444 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1445 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1446 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1447 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1448 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1450 ** Improved robustness
1452 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1453 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1454 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1455 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1456 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1457 loss of the contents of a/f.
1459 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1460 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1464 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1465 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1468 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1469 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1470 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1471 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1473 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1474 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1475 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1476 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1477 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1478 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1479 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1480 destination is a symlink.
1482 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1484 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1485 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1487 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1488 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1490 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1492 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1493 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1495 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1496 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1498 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1501 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1502 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1504 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1505 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1507 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1508 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1509 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1510 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1512 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1513 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1514 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1516 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1517 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1518 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1520 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1521 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1522 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1523 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1525 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1526 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1527 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1529 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1530 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1532 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1533 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1535 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1537 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1538 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1539 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1541 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1542 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1544 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1545 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1547 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1548 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1550 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1551 [present in the original version]
1554 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1558 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1560 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1561 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1562 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1564 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1565 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1567 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1571 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1572 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1574 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1575 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1577 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1578 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1580 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1581 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1582 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1583 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1584 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1585 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1587 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1588 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1591 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1592 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1594 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1597 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1598 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1599 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1601 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1602 directory is unreadable.
1604 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1605 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1606 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1608 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1609 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1610 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1611 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1612 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1615 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1616 Before it would print nothing.
1618 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1620 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1621 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1622 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1623 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1624 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1625 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1626 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1627 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1629 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1633 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1634 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1635 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1637 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1638 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1639 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1640 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1643 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1647 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1648 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1649 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1650 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1651 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1652 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1653 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1655 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1656 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1657 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1658 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1659 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1660 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1661 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1662 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1664 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1665 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1666 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1669 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1673 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1674 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1676 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1677 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1678 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1680 ** Improved robustness
1682 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1683 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1684 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1687 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1691 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1692 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1693 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1694 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1695 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1697 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1701 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1704 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1708 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1709 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1710 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1711 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1713 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1714 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1716 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1717 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1718 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1721 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1723 ** Improved robustness
1725 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1726 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1728 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1729 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1730 or NFS-mounted partition.
1732 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1733 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1737 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1738 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1739 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1740 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1741 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1742 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1744 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1745 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1747 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1748 or neglect to report file removal.
1750 For the "groups" command:
1752 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1753 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1755 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1757 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1759 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1763 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1764 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1767 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1769 ** Changes in behavior
1771 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1772 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1773 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1774 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1776 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1777 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1778 a final `./' or `../' component.
1780 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1781 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1782 this only for pipes.
1784 ** Infrastructure changes
1786 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1787 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1788 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1789 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1793 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1794 name is "." or "..".
1796 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1797 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1798 dirent.d_type support.
1800 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1801 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1803 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1804 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1805 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1806 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1809 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1811 ** Changes in behavior
1813 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1817 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1818 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1822 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1823 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1824 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1826 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1827 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1829 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1830 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1832 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1834 ** Improved robustness
1836 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1837 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1838 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1840 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1841 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1844 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1845 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1847 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1848 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1850 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1851 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1853 ** Changes in behavior
1855 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1856 where the two are distinct.
1858 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1859 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1860 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1861 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1862 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1863 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1864 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1865 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1866 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1867 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1868 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1869 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1870 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1871 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1872 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1873 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1874 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1876 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1877 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1878 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1880 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1881 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1882 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1883 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1886 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1887 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1891 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1892 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1893 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1894 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1896 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1897 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1898 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1900 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1901 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1902 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1903 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1904 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1907 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1908 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1910 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1911 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1912 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1913 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1915 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1916 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1917 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1919 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1920 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1921 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1922 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1924 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1925 and sticky) with the -m option.
1927 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1928 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1929 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1930 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1931 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1933 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1934 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1936 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1940 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1941 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1942 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1943 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1945 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1947 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1949 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1950 silently ignoring one of them.
1952 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1953 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1954 containing this change was 5.92.
1956 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1957 automatically newline terminated.
1959 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1960 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1961 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1962 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1965 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1966 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1967 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1970 ** Scheduled for removal
1972 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1973 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1975 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1976 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1977 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1978 command to unlink a directory.
1980 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1981 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1982 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1983 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1987 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1988 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1989 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1990 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1991 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1992 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1996 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1997 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1999 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2001 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2002 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2003 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2005 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2006 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2009 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2010 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2012 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2013 list directories before files.
2015 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2016 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2017 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2018 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2021 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2023 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2025 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2026 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2027 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2029 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2030 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2034 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2035 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2036 usually printing nothing.
2038 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2040 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2041 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2042 them with hard-linked directories.
2044 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2045 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2046 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2048 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2049 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2050 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2052 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2055 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2056 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2058 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2059 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2061 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2062 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2064 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2065 all command-line arguments.
2067 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2069 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2071 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2072 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2074 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2076 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2077 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2078 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2079 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2080 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2082 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2083 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2085 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2086 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2087 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2088 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2090 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2092 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2096 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2097 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2099 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2100 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2102 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2103 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2105 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2106 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2108 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2109 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2111 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2113 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2114 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2115 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2118 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2120 ** Build-related bug fixes
2122 installing .mo files would fail
2125 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2129 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2131 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2134 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2138 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2139 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2143 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2145 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2146 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2148 ** Deprecated options
2150 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2151 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2153 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2157 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2159 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2160 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2161 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2162 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2164 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2167 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2173 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2178 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2180 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2182 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2183 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2184 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2186 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2187 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2188 problematic usages. These include:
2190 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2191 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2192 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2193 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2194 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2195 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2196 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2197 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2198 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2200 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2201 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2203 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2204 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2205 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2206 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2208 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2209 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2210 between binary and text files.
2212 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2216 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2220 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2221 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2223 head tac tail tee tr
2224 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2226 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2227 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2229 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2230 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2231 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2233 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2235 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2237 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2238 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2239 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2243 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2245 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2246 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2248 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2249 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2250 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2254 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2255 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2259 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2260 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2261 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2265 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2266 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2270 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2272 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2274 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2278 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2279 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2280 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2282 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2283 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2284 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2285 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2286 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2288 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2292 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2293 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2294 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2296 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2298 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2299 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2300 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2301 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2303 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2305 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2306 rather than silently wrapping around.
2308 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2309 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2311 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2312 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2314 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2315 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2316 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2317 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2319 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2321 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2323 ** Improved robustness
2325 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2326 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2327 no matter how large the result.
2329 ** Improved portability
2331 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2332 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2334 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2336 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2337 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2338 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2340 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2341 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2345 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2346 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2348 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2350 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2351 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2352 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2353 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2355 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2356 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2358 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2359 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2360 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2362 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2364 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2365 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2367 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2368 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2370 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2372 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2373 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2375 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2376 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2378 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2379 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2380 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2382 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2384 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2386 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2390 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2392 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2393 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2394 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2396 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2397 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2399 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2400 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2401 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2403 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2404 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2406 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2407 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2408 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2409 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2411 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2412 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2414 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2415 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2416 the file system does not support it.
2418 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2420 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2421 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2423 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2425 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2426 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2428 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2429 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2430 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2431 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2433 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2434 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2437 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2438 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2439 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2440 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2442 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2443 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2444 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2445 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2447 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2448 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2450 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2452 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2453 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2454 reporting incorrect results.
2458 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2459 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2461 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2464 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2466 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2467 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2469 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2470 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2472 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2475 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2476 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2477 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2478 the file name does not look like a page range.
2480 printf has several changes:
2482 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2483 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2485 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2486 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2487 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2489 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2490 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2493 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2494 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2496 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2497 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2499 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2501 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2502 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2504 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2506 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2508 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2509 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2510 when first encountering the directory.
2514 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2515 output; POSIX requires this.
2517 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2518 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2520 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2522 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2523 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2525 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2526 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2528 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2529 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2530 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2531 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2532 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2533 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2534 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2536 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2537 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2538 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2540 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2541 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2543 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2545 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2547 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2548 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2549 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2550 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2552 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2556 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2557 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2558 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2559 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2560 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2562 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2563 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2564 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2566 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2567 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2569 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2570 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2572 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2573 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2574 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2575 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2576 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2578 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2579 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2581 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2582 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2584 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2586 nocreat do not create the output file
2587 excl fail if the output file already exists
2588 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2589 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2591 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2593 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2594 direct use direct I/O for data
2595 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2596 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2597 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2598 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2599 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2601 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2603 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2604 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2607 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2608 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2609 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2610 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2611 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2612 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2614 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2615 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2617 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2620 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2622 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2624 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2625 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2627 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2628 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2629 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2631 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2632 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2633 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2635 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2637 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2638 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2640 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2641 for compatibility with bash.
2643 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2645 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2646 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2647 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2648 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2650 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2651 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2653 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2654 ls supports TABSIZE.
2655 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2656 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2657 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2659 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2662 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2664 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2665 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2666 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2667 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2668 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2669 an offset, not as a file name.
2671 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2672 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2674 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2675 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2677 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2678 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2680 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2681 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2682 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2684 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2685 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2687 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2688 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2692 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2694 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2696 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2700 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2701 or more arguments between partitions.
2703 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2704 holes in the destination.
2706 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2707 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2708 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2709 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2710 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2711 terminates immediately.
2713 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2715 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2717 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2718 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2719 not the empty string.
2721 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2722 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2726 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2727 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2728 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2731 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2738 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2742 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2743 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2745 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2746 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2748 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2749 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2750 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2753 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2757 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2758 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2760 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2761 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2763 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2764 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2765 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2767 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2769 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2772 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2774 ** Configuration option
2776 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2777 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2781 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2782 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2786 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2787 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2788 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2791 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2792 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2793 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2794 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2795 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2796 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2797 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2800 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2804 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2805 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2806 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2808 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2809 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2811 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2813 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2814 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2815 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2816 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2818 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2820 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2821 not just the ones that reference directories
2823 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2824 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2826 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2827 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2828 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2830 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2831 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2832 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2833 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2834 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2835 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2837 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2842 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2843 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2845 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2847 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2849 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2851 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2852 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2854 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2855 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2857 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2859 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2863 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2865 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2867 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2868 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2869 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2870 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2871 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2873 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2874 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2876 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2877 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2879 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2880 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2882 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2883 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2884 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2888 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2889 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2890 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2891 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2892 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2893 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2894 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2895 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2896 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2897 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2898 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2899 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2900 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2901 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2903 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2905 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2906 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2908 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2910 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2912 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2913 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2915 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2917 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2918 without a trailing newline.
2920 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2921 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2923 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2926 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2930 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2932 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2934 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2935 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2936 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2937 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2939 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2941 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2942 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2943 be printed without leading spaces.
2945 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2946 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2951 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2952 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2953 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2955 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2957 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2958 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2960 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2961 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2963 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2964 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2966 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2968 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2970 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2972 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2973 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2975 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2977 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2979 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2980 byte offsets are specified.
2983 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2986 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2989 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2990 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2991 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2992 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2993 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2994 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2995 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2996 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2997 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2998 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2999 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3000 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3001 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3002 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3003 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3004 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3005 directory where M has write access.
3006 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3007 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3008 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3011 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3012 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3013 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3014 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3015 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3016 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3017 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3018 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3019 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3020 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3021 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3022 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3023 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3024 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3025 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3026 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3027 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3028 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3029 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3030 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3031 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3032 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3033 appeared one additional time.
3035 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3036 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3037 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3038 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3041 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3042 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3043 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3044 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3045 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3046 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3047 if there were more than 338.
3049 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3050 - false --help now exits nonzero
3053 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3054 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3055 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3056 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3059 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3060 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3061 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3062 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3063 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3066 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3067 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3068 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3069 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3070 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3071 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3072 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3075 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3076 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3077 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3078 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3079 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3080 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3082 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3083 under certain unusual conditions
3084 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3085 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3088 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3089 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3090 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3091 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3092 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3093 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3094 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3095 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3096 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3097 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3098 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3099 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3100 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3101 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3102 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3103 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3106 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3107 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3110 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3111 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3112 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3113 involving hard-linked directories
3114 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3115 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3116 character-special and block files
3119 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3120 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3121 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3122 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3123 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3124 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3125 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3126 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3127 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3129 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3130 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3131 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3132 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3133 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3134 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3135 specified on the command line.
3136 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3137 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3138 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3139 the first file untouched.
3140 * readlink: new program
3141 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3142 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3143 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3144 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3145 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3146 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3149 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3150 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3151 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3152 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3153 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3154 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3155 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3156 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3157 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3158 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3159 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3160 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3162 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3163 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3164 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3166 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3167 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3168 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3169 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3170 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3171 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3172 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3173 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3176 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3177 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3180 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3181 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3182 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3183 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3184 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3185 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3186 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3189 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3190 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3192 ========================================================================
3193 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3194 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3197 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3199 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3200 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3201 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3202 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3203 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3204 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3205 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3206 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3207 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3208 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3209 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3210 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3212 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3213 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3214 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3215 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3217 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3220 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3222 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3223 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3224 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3225 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3226 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3227 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3228 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3231 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3232 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3233 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3234 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3235 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3236 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3237 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3238 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3239 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3240 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3241 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3242 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3243 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3244 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3245 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3246 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3248 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3249 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3251 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3252 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3253 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3254 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3255 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3256 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3258 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3259 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3260 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3261 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3262 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3263 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3264 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3266 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3267 the source files in the following example:
3268 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3269 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3270 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3271 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3272 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3273 links between source files with --preserve=links
3274 * cp accepts new options:
3275 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3276 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3277 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3278 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3279 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3280 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3281 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3282 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3283 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3285 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3286 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3287 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3288 even though it's older than dest.
3289 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3290 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3291 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3292 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3293 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3295 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3296 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3297 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3298 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3299 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3300 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3301 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3303 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3304 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3305 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3307 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3308 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3309 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3310 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3311 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3312 This is the default.
3314 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3315 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3316 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3317 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3318 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3320 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3323 ========================================================================
3324 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3325 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3328 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3329 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3331 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3332 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3333 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3334 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3335 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3337 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3338 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3339 that specifies a non-directory
3342 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3343 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3344 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3345 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3346 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3347 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3348 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3349 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3350 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3351 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3352 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3353 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3354 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3355 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3356 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3357 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3358 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3359 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3360 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3361 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3362 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3363 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3364 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3365 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3367 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3368 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3369 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3371 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3373 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3374 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3376 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3377 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3378 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3379 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3380 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3382 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3383 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3384 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3385 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3386 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3388 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3390 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3391 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3392 * still more portability fixes
3393 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3394 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3396 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3398 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3400 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3402 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3403 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3404 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3405 there is any time remaining
3406 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3408 ========================================================================
3409 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3410 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3412 This package began as the union of the following:
3413 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3415 ========================================================================
3417 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3419 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3420 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3421 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3422 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3423 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3424 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.