1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
8 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
9 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
13 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
14 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
16 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
19 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
20 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
22 ** Changes in behavior
24 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
25 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
26 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
28 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
29 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
30 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
31 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
32 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
33 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
34 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
35 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
37 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
39 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
40 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
41 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
42 control like taskset for example.
44 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
45 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
46 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.
48 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
49 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
50 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
52 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
53 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
54 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
57 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
61 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
62 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
64 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
66 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
69 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
70 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
71 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
72 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
74 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
75 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
80 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
81 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
83 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
84 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
85 duration after the initial signal was sent.
87 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
88 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
89 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
90 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
91 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
92 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
93 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
94 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
95 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
97 ** Changes in behavior
99 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
100 sequence when it would be a no-op.
102 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
103 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
106 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
110 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
111 of available processors, which may not have been the case
112 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
117 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
118 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
120 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
121 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
122 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
123 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
125 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
126 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
127 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
130 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
134 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
135 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
138 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
139 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
140 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
142 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
145 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
146 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
147 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
150 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
151 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
152 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
154 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
155 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
156 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
159 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
160 renamed-aside and then recreated.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
163 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
164 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
165 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
168 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
169 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
172 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
173 processes will not intersperse their output.
174 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
181 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
184 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
187 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
188 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
189 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
190 the presence of the empty string argument.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
193 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
194 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
195 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
196 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
198 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
201 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
202 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
203 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
205 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
206 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
207 and with a malicious user on the same system
208 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
212 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
216 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
217 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
218 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
220 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
221 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
222 offending directory and all "contents."
224 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
225 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
226 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
228 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
229 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
230 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
232 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
233 processes will not intersperse their output.
234 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
235 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
237 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
238 output the name of the file to stdout.
239 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
241 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
242 call fails with errno == EACCES.
243 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
245 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
246 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
249 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
250 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
251 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
253 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
254 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
255 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
256 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
257 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
258 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
260 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
261 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
262 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
263 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
265 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
266 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
268 ** Changes in behavior
270 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
271 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
272 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
273 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
274 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
276 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
277 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
278 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
279 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
281 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
283 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
284 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
285 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
286 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
287 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
291 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
295 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
296 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
298 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
299 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
301 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
302 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
303 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
305 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
306 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
309 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
313 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
314 when the source file doesn't have write access.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
317 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
318 to accommodate leap seconds.
319 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
321 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
322 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
325 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
327 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
328 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
329 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
331 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
332 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
333 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
334 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
335 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
339 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
340 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
341 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
342 directory or a symlink to a directory.
344 ** Changes in behavior
346 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
347 environment variable is set.
349 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
350 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
351 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
355 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
356 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
357 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
358 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
360 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
361 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
362 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
363 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
367 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
368 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
369 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
371 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
372 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
373 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
374 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
375 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
376 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
379 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
380 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
383 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
387 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
388 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
389 and libraries tested at configure time.
390 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
392 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
395 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
398 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
399 printing a summary to stderr.
400 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
402 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
403 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
404 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
406 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
409 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
410 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
411 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
412 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
414 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
415 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
416 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
417 which is relatively unusual.
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
420 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
421 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
422 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
423 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
424 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
425 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
430 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
431 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
432 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
433 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
434 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
438 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
439 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
441 ** Changes in behavior
443 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
444 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
445 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
446 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
447 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
450 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
454 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
455 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
457 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
458 before data copying has started.
460 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
461 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
463 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
464 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
465 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
466 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
468 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
469 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
470 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
471 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
473 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
478 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
479 for its standard streams.
481 ** Changes in behavior
483 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
484 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
485 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
486 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
487 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
488 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
490 ** Deprecated options
492 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
493 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
497 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
499 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
500 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
503 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
505 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
506 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
508 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
509 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
512 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
516 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
517 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
518 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
519 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
521 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
522 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
523 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
524 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
525 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
530 make check: two tests have been corrected
534 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
535 inherited from gnulib.
538 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
542 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
543 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
544 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
545 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
547 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
548 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
550 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
552 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
553 systems without xattr support.
555 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
556 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
557 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
559 ** Changes in behavior
561 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
562 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
563 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
564 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
566 ** Improved robustness
568 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
569 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
570 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
571 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
572 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
573 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
574 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
575 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
576 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
580 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
581 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
583 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
584 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
585 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
586 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
587 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
590 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
594 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
595 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
596 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
600 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
601 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
602 data was read, or on process exit.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
605 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
606 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
607 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
608 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
610 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
611 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
612 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
615 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
616 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
618 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
619 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
621 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
622 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
623 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
625 ** Changes in behavior
627 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
628 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
629 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
631 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
632 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
634 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
635 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
636 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
639 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
643 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
645 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
646 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
647 install: Never copies xattrs
649 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
650 from overwriting any existing destination file
652 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
653 mode where this feature is available.
655 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
656 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
657 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
658 do not modify the destination at all.
660 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
662 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
666 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
669 cp uses much less memory in some situations
671 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
672 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
674 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
675 processing the first file name
677 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
678 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
679 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
680 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
682 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
683 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
685 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
686 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
689 ** Changes in behavior
691 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
692 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
694 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
695 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
696 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
698 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
699 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
701 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
703 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
704 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
705 is still marked with a '+'.
708 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
712 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
713 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
717 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
718 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
719 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
720 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
721 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
722 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
724 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
725 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
727 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
728 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
730 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
732 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
733 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
734 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
736 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
737 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
739 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
740 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
741 used to factor large numbers.
743 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
746 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
748 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
750 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
751 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
753 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
754 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
755 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
756 maximum command-line (argv) length.
758 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
759 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
760 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
762 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
763 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
767 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
769 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
770 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
772 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
773 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
775 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
777 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
778 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
782 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
783 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
784 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
786 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
788 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
789 no matter how many files are in a given directory
791 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
792 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
793 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
795 ** Changes in behavior
797 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
798 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
801 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
805 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
807 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
808 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
809 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
811 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
812 with no USERNAME argument.
814 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
815 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
816 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
818 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
819 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
820 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
821 number of fields for some inputs.
823 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
824 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
826 ** Changes in behavior
828 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
829 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
832 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
836 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
838 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
839 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
840 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
841 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
843 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
844 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
846 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
847 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
849 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
850 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
852 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
853 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
854 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
855 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
857 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
858 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
859 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
860 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
861 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
862 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
864 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
865 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
867 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
868 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
869 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
871 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
872 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
874 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
875 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
877 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
878 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
879 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
880 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
882 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
883 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
885 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
886 in more cases when a directory is empty.
888 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
889 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
894 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
895 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
897 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
898 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
899 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
900 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
904 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
905 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
907 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
909 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
913 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
914 which have negative errno values.
918 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
926 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
927 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
930 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
934 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
935 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
938 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
939 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
940 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
945 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
946 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
947 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
948 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
951 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
955 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
957 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
958 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
959 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
962 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
966 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
967 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
969 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
971 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
973 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
975 ** Programs no longer installed by default
979 ** Changes in behavior
981 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
982 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
984 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
985 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
987 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
988 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
989 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
993 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
994 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
995 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
996 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
997 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
998 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
999 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1000 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1001 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1002 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1003 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1005 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1006 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1007 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1010 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1013 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1014 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1015 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1017 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1018 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1019 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1022 ** New build options
1024 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1025 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1026 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1027 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1029 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1030 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1031 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1032 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1033 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1034 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1035 of "make check" fail.
1037 ** Remove deprecated options
1039 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1040 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1041 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1042 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1043 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1045 ** Improved robustness
1047 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1048 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1049 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1050 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1051 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1052 loss of the contents of a/f.
1054 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1055 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1059 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1060 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1061 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1063 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1064 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1065 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1066 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1068 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1069 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1070 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1071 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1072 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1073 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1074 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1075 destination is a symlink.
1077 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1079 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1080 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1082 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1083 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1085 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1087 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1088 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1090 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1091 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1093 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1096 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1097 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1099 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1100 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1102 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1103 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1104 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1105 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1107 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1108 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1109 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1111 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1112 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1113 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1115 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1116 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1117 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1118 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1120 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1121 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1122 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1124 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1125 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1127 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1128 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1130 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1132 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1133 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1134 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1136 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1137 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1139 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1140 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1142 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1143 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1145 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1146 [present in the original version]
1149 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1153 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1155 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1156 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1157 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1159 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1160 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1166 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1167 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1169 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1170 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1172 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1173 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1175 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1176 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1177 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1178 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1179 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1180 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1182 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1183 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1186 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1187 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1189 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1192 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1193 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1194 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1196 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1197 directory is unreadable.
1199 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1200 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1201 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1203 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1204 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1205 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1206 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1207 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1210 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1211 Before it would print nothing.
1213 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1215 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1216 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1217 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1218 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1219 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1220 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1221 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1222 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1224 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1228 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1229 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1230 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1232 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1233 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1234 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1235 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1238 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1242 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1243 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1244 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1245 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1246 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1247 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1248 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1250 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1251 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1252 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1253 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1254 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1255 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1256 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1257 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1259 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1260 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1261 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1264 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1268 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1269 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1271 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1272 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1273 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1275 ** Improved robustness
1277 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1278 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1279 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1282 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1286 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1287 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1288 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1289 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1290 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1292 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1296 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1299 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1303 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1304 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1305 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1306 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1308 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1309 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1311 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1312 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1313 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1316 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1318 ** Improved robustness
1320 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1321 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1323 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1324 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1325 or NFS-mounted partition.
1327 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1328 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1332 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1333 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1334 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1335 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1336 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1337 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1339 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1340 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1342 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1343 or neglect to report file removal.
1345 For the "groups" command:
1347 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1348 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1350 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1352 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1354 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1358 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1359 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1362 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1364 ** Changes in behavior
1366 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1367 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1368 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1369 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1371 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1372 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1373 a final `./' or `../' component.
1375 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1376 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1377 this only for pipes.
1379 ** Infrastructure changes
1381 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1382 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1383 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1384 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1388 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1389 name is "." or "..".
1391 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1392 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1393 dirent.d_type support.
1395 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1396 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1398 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1399 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1400 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1401 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1404 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1406 ** Changes in behavior
1408 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1412 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1413 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1417 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1418 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1419 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1421 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1422 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1424 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1425 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1427 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1429 ** Improved robustness
1431 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1432 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1433 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1435 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1436 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1439 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1440 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1442 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1443 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1445 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1446 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1448 ** Changes in behavior
1450 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1451 where the two are distinct.
1453 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1454 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1455 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1456 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1457 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1458 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1459 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1460 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1461 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1462 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1463 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1464 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1465 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1466 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1467 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1468 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1469 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1471 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1472 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1473 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1475 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1476 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1477 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1478 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1481 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1482 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1486 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1487 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1488 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1489 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1491 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1492 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1493 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1495 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1496 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1497 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1498 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1499 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1502 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1503 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1505 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1506 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1507 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1508 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1510 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1511 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1512 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1514 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1515 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1516 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1517 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1519 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1520 and sticky) with the -m option.
1522 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1523 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1524 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1525 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1526 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1528 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1529 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1531 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1535 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1536 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1537 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1538 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1540 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1542 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1544 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1545 silently ignoring one of them.
1547 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1548 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1549 containing this change was 5.92.
1551 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1552 automatically newline terminated.
1554 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1555 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1556 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1557 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1560 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1561 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1562 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1565 ** Scheduled for removal
1567 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1568 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1570 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1571 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1572 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1573 command to unlink a directory.
1575 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1576 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1577 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1578 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1582 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1583 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1584 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1585 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1586 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1587 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1591 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1592 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1594 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1596 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1597 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1598 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1600 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1601 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1604 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1605 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1607 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1608 list directories before files.
1610 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1611 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1612 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1613 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1616 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1618 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1620 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1621 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1622 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1624 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1625 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1629 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1630 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1631 usually printing nothing.
1633 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1635 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1636 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1637 them with hard-linked directories.
1639 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1640 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1641 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1643 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1644 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1645 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1647 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1650 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1651 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1653 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1654 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1656 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1657 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1659 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1660 all command-line arguments.
1662 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1664 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1666 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1667 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1669 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1671 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1672 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1673 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1674 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1675 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1677 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1678 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1680 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1681 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1682 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1683 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1685 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1687 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1691 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1692 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1694 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1695 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1697 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1698 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1700 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1701 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1703 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1704 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1706 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1708 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1709 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1710 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1713 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1715 ** Build-related bug fixes
1717 installing .mo files would fail
1720 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1724 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1726 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1729 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1733 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1734 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1738 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1740 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1741 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1743 ** Deprecated options
1745 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1746 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1748 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1752 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1754 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1755 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1756 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1757 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1759 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1762 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1768 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1773 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1775 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1777 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1778 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1779 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1781 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1782 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1783 problematic usages. These include:
1785 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1786 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1787 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1788 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1789 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1790 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1791 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1792 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1793 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1795 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1796 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1798 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1799 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1800 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1801 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1803 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1804 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1805 between binary and text files.
1807 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1811 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1815 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1816 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1818 head tac tail tee tr
1819 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1821 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1822 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1824 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1825 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1826 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1828 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1830 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1832 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1833 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1834 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1838 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1840 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1841 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1843 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1844 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1845 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1849 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1850 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1854 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1855 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1856 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1860 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1861 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1865 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1867 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1869 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1873 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1874 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1875 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1877 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1878 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1879 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1880 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1881 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1883 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1887 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1888 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1889 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1891 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1893 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1894 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1895 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1896 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1898 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1900 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1901 rather than silently wrapping around.
1903 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1904 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1906 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1907 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1909 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1910 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1911 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1912 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1914 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1916 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1918 ** Improved robustness
1920 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1921 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1922 no matter how large the result.
1924 ** Improved portability
1926 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1927 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1929 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1931 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1932 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1933 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1935 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1936 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1940 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1941 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1943 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1945 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1946 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1947 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1948 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1950 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1951 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1953 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1954 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1955 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1957 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1959 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1960 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1962 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1963 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1965 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1967 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1968 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1970 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1971 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1973 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1974 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1975 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1977 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1979 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1981 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1985 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1987 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1988 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1989 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1991 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1992 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1994 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1995 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1996 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1998 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1999 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2001 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2002 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2003 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2004 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2006 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2007 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2009 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2010 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2011 the file system does not support it.
2013 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2015 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2016 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2018 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2020 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2021 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2023 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2024 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2025 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2026 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2028 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2029 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2032 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2033 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2034 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2035 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2037 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2038 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2039 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2040 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2042 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2043 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2045 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2047 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2048 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2049 reporting incorrect results.
2053 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2054 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2056 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2059 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2061 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2062 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2064 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2065 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2067 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2070 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2071 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2072 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2073 the file name does not look like a page range.
2075 printf has several changes:
2077 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2078 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2080 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2081 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2082 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2084 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2085 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2088 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2089 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2091 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2092 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2094 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2096 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2097 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2099 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2101 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2103 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2104 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2105 when first encountering the directory.
2109 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2110 output; POSIX requires this.
2112 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2113 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2115 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2117 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2118 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2120 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2121 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2123 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2124 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2125 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2126 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2127 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2128 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2129 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2131 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2132 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2133 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2135 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2136 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2138 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2140 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2142 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2143 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2144 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2145 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2147 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2151 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2152 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2153 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2154 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2155 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2157 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2158 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2159 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2161 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2162 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2164 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2165 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2167 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2168 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2169 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2170 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2171 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2173 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2174 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2176 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2177 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2179 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2181 nocreat do not create the output file
2182 excl fail if the output file already exists
2183 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2184 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2186 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2188 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2189 direct use direct I/O for data
2190 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2191 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2192 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2193 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2194 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2196 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2198 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2199 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2202 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2203 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2204 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2205 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2206 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2207 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2209 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2210 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2212 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2215 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2217 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2219 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2220 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2222 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2223 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2224 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2226 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2227 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2228 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2230 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2232 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2233 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2235 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2236 for compatibility with bash.
2238 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2240 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2241 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2242 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2243 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2245 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2246 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2248 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2249 ls supports TABSIZE.
2250 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2251 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2252 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2254 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2257 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2259 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2260 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2261 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2262 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2263 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2264 an offset, not as a file name.
2266 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2267 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2269 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2270 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2272 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2273 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2275 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2276 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2277 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2279 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2280 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2282 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2283 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2287 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2289 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2291 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2295 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2296 or more arguments between partitions.
2298 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2299 holes in the destination.
2301 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2302 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2303 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2304 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2305 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2306 terminates immediately.
2308 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2310 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2312 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2313 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2314 not the empty string.
2316 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2317 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2321 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2322 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2323 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2326 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2333 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2337 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2338 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2340 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2341 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2343 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2344 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2345 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2348 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2352 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2353 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2355 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2356 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2358 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2359 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2360 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2362 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2364 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2367 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2369 ** Configuration option
2371 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2372 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2376 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2377 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2381 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2382 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2383 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2386 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2387 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2388 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2389 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2390 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2391 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2392 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2395 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2399 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2400 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2401 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2403 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2404 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2406 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2408 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2409 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2410 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2411 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2413 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2415 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2416 not just the ones that reference directories
2418 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2419 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2421 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2422 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2423 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2425 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2426 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2427 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2428 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2429 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2430 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2432 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2437 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2438 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2440 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2442 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2444 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2446 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2447 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2449 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2450 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2452 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2454 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2458 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2460 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2462 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2463 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2464 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2465 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2466 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2468 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2469 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2471 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2472 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2474 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2475 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2477 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2478 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2479 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2483 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2484 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2485 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2486 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2487 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2488 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2489 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2490 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2491 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2492 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2493 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2494 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2495 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2496 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2498 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2500 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2501 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2503 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2505 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2507 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2508 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2510 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2512 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2513 without a trailing newline.
2515 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2516 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2518 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2521 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2525 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2527 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2529 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2530 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2531 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2532 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2534 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2536 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2537 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2538 be printed without leading spaces.
2540 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2541 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2546 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2547 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2548 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2550 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2552 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2553 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2555 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2556 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2558 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2559 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2561 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2563 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2565 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2567 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2568 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2570 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2572 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2574 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2575 byte offsets are specified.
2578 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2581 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2584 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2585 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2586 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2587 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2588 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2589 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2590 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2591 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2592 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2593 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2594 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2595 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2596 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2597 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2598 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2599 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2600 directory where M has write access.
2601 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2602 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2603 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2606 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2607 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2608 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2609 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2610 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2611 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2612 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2613 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2614 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2615 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2616 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2617 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2618 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2619 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2620 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2621 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2622 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2623 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2624 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2625 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2626 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2627 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2628 appeared one additional time.
2630 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2631 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2632 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2633 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2636 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2637 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2638 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2639 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2640 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2641 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2642 if there were more than 338.
2644 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2645 - false --help now exits nonzero
2648 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2649 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2650 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2651 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2654 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2655 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2656 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2657 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2658 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2661 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2662 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2663 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2664 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2665 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2666 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2667 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2670 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2671 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2672 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2673 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2674 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2675 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2677 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2678 under certain unusual conditions
2679 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2680 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2683 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2684 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2685 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2686 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2687 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2688 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2689 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2690 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2691 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2692 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2693 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2694 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2695 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2696 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2697 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2698 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2701 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2702 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2705 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2706 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2707 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2708 involving hard-linked directories
2709 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2710 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2711 character-special and block files
2714 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2715 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2716 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2717 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2718 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2719 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2720 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2721 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2722 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2724 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2725 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2726 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2727 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2728 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2729 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2730 specified on the command line.
2731 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2732 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2733 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2734 the first file untouched.
2735 * readlink: new program
2736 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2737 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2738 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2739 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2740 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2741 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2744 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2745 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2746 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2747 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2748 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2749 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2750 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2751 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2752 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2753 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2754 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2755 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2757 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2758 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2759 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2761 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2762 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2763 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2764 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2765 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2766 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2767 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2768 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2771 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2772 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2775 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2776 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2777 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2778 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2779 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2780 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2781 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2784 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2785 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2787 ========================================================================
2788 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2789 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2792 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2794 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2795 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2796 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2797 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2798 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2799 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2800 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2801 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2802 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2803 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2804 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2805 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2807 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2808 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2809 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2810 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2812 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2815 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2817 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2818 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2819 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2820 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2821 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2822 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2823 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2826 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2827 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2828 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2829 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2830 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2831 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2832 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2833 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2834 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2835 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2836 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2837 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2838 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2839 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2840 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2841 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2843 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2844 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2846 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2847 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2848 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2849 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2850 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2851 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2853 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2854 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2855 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2856 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2857 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2858 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2859 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2861 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2862 the source files in the following example:
2863 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2864 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2865 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2866 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2867 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2868 links between source files with --preserve=links
2869 * cp accepts new options:
2870 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2871 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2872 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2873 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2874 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2875 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2876 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2877 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2878 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2880 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2881 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2882 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2883 even though it's older than dest.
2884 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2885 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2886 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2887 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2888 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2890 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2891 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2892 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2893 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2894 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2895 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2896 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2898 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2899 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2900 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2902 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2903 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2904 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2905 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2906 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2907 This is the default.
2909 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2910 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2911 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2912 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2913 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2915 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2918 ========================================================================
2919 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2920 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2923 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2924 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2926 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2927 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2928 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2929 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2930 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2932 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2933 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2934 that specifies a non-directory
2937 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2938 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2939 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2940 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2941 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2942 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2943 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2944 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2945 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2946 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2947 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2948 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2949 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2950 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2951 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2952 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2953 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2954 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2955 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2956 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2957 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2958 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2959 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2960 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2962 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2963 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2964 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2966 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2968 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2969 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2971 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2972 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2973 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2974 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2975 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2977 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2978 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2979 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2980 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2981 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2983 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2985 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2986 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2987 * still more portability fixes
2988 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2989 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2991 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2993 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2995 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2997 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2998 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2999 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3000 there is any time remaining
3001 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3003 ========================================================================
3004 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3005 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3007 This package began as the union of the following:
3008 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3010 ========================================================================
3012 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3014 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3015 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3016 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3017 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3018 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3019 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.