1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
8 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
11 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
12 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
13 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
15 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
16 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
18 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
19 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
20 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
23 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
24 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
27 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
28 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
29 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
32 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
33 renamed-aside and then recreated.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
36 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
37 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
38 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
39 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
41 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
42 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
43 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
45 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
46 processes will not intersperse their output.
47 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
50 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
54 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
55 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
57 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
60 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
61 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
62 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
63 the presence of the empty string argument.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
66 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
67 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
68 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
69 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
71 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
74 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
75 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
76 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
78 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
79 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
80 and with a malicious user on the same system
81 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
82 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
85 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
89 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
90 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
93 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
94 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
95 offending directory and all "contents."
97 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
98 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
99 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
101 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
102 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
103 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
105 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
106 processes will not intersperse their output.
107 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
108 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
110 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
111 output the name of the file to stdout.
112 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
114 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
115 call fails with errno == EACCES.
116 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
118 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
119 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
122 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
123 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
124 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
126 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
127 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
128 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
129 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
130 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
131 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
133 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
134 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
135 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
136 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
138 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
139 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
141 ** Changes in behavior
143 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
144 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
145 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
146 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
147 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
149 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
150 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
151 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
152 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
154 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
156 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
157 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
158 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
159 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
160 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
164 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
168 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
169 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
171 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
172 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
174 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
175 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
176 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
178 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
179 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
186 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
187 when the source file doesn't have write access.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
190 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
191 to accommodate leap seconds.
192 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
194 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
195 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
198 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
200 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
201 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
202 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
204 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
205 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
206 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
207 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
208 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
212 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
213 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
214 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
215 directory or a symlink to a directory.
217 ** Changes in behavior
219 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
220 environment variable is set.
222 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
223 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
224 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
228 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
229 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
230 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
231 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
233 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
234 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
235 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
236 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
240 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
241 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
242 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
244 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
245 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
246 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
247 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
248 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
249 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
252 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
253 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
256 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
260 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
261 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
262 and libraries tested at configure time.
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
265 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
268 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
271 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
272 printing a summary to stderr.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
275 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
276 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
277 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
279 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
282 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
283 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
284 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
285 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
287 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
288 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
289 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
290 which is relatively unusual.
291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
293 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
294 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
295 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
296 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
297 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
298 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
303 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
304 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
305 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
306 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
307 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
311 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
312 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
314 ** Changes in behavior
316 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
317 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
318 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
319 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
320 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
323 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
327 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
328 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
330 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
331 before data copying has started.
333 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
334 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
336 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
337 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
338 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
339 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
341 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
342 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
343 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
344 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
346 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
351 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
352 for its standard streams.
354 ** Changes in behavior
356 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
357 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
358 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
359 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
360 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
361 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
363 ** Deprecated options
365 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
366 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
370 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
372 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
373 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
376 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
378 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
379 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
381 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
382 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
385 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
389 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
390 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
391 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
392 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
394 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
395 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
396 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
397 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
398 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
403 make check: two tests have been corrected
407 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
408 inherited from gnulib.
411 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
415 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
416 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
417 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
418 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
420 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
421 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
423 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
425 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
426 systems without xattr support.
428 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
429 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
430 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
432 ** Changes in behavior
434 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
435 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
436 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
437 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
439 ** Improved robustness
441 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
442 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
443 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
444 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
445 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
446 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
447 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
448 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
449 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
453 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
454 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
456 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
457 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
458 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
459 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
460 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
463 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
467 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
468 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
469 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
473 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
474 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
475 data was read, or on process exit.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
478 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
479 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
480 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
481 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
483 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
484 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
485 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
488 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
489 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
491 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
494 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
495 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
496 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
498 ** Changes in behavior
500 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
501 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
502 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
504 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
505 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
507 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
508 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
509 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
512 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
516 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
518 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
519 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
520 install: Never copies xattrs
522 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
523 from overwriting any existing destination file
525 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
526 mode where this feature is available.
528 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
529 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
530 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
531 do not modify the destination at all.
533 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
535 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
539 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
542 cp uses much less memory in some situations
544 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
545 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
547 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
548 processing the first file name
550 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
551 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
552 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
553 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
555 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
556 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
558 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
559 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
562 ** Changes in behavior
564 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
565 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
567 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
568 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
569 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
571 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
572 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
574 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
576 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
577 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
578 is still marked with a '+'.
581 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
585 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
586 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
590 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
591 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
592 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
593 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
594 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
595 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
597 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
598 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
600 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
601 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
603 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
605 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
606 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
607 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
609 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
610 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
612 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
613 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
614 used to factor large numbers.
616 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
619 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
621 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
623 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
624 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
626 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
627 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
628 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
629 maximum command-line (argv) length.
631 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
632 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
633 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
635 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
636 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
640 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
642 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
643 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
645 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
646 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
648 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
650 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
651 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
655 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
656 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
657 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
659 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
661 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
662 no matter how many files are in a given directory
664 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
665 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
666 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
668 ** Changes in behavior
670 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
671 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
674 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
678 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
680 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
681 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
682 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
684 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
685 with no USERNAME argument.
687 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
688 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
689 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
691 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
692 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
693 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
694 number of fields for some inputs.
696 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
697 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
699 ** Changes in behavior
701 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
702 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
705 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
709 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
711 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
712 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
713 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
714 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
716 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
717 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
719 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
720 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
722 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
723 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
725 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
726 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
727 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
730 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
731 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
732 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
733 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
734 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
735 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
737 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
738 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
740 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
741 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
744 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
745 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
747 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
748 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
750 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
751 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
752 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
753 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
755 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
756 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
758 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
759 in more cases when a directory is empty.
761 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
762 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
767 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
768 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
770 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
771 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
772 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
773 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
777 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
778 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
780 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
782 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
786 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
787 which have negative errno values.
791 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
795 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
799 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
803 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
807 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
808 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
811 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
812 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
813 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
818 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
819 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
820 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
821 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
824 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
828 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
830 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
831 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
832 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
835 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
839 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
840 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
842 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
844 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
846 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
848 ** Programs no longer installed by default
852 ** Changes in behavior
854 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
855 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
857 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
858 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
860 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
861 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
862 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
866 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
867 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
868 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
869 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
870 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
871 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
872 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
873 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
874 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
875 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
876 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
878 The following commands and options now support the standard size
879 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
880 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
883 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
886 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
887 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
888 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
890 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
891 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
892 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
897 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
898 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
899 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
900 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
902 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
903 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
904 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
905 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
906 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
907 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
908 of "make check" fail.
910 ** Remove deprecated options
912 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
913 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
914 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
915 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
916 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
918 ** Improved robustness
920 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
921 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
922 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
923 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
924 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
925 loss of the contents of a/f.
927 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
928 in its 35-colon command-line argument
932 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
933 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
934 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
936 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
937 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
938 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
939 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
941 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
942 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
943 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
944 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
945 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
946 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
947 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
948 destination is a symlink.
950 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
952 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
953 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
955 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
956 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
958 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
960 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
961 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
963 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
964 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
966 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
969 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
970 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
972 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
973 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
975 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
976 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
977 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
978 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
980 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
981 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
982 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
984 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
985 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
986 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
988 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
989 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
990 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
991 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
993 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
994 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
995 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
997 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
998 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1000 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1001 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1003 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1005 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1006 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1007 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1009 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1010 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1012 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1013 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1015 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1016 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1018 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1019 [present in the original version]
1022 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1026 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1028 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1029 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1030 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1032 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1033 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1035 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1039 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1040 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1042 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1043 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1045 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1046 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1048 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1049 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1050 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1051 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1052 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1053 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1055 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1056 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1059 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1060 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1062 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1065 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1066 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1067 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1069 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1070 directory is unreadable.
1072 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1073 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1074 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1076 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1077 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1078 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1079 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1080 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1083 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1084 Before it would print nothing.
1086 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1088 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1089 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1090 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1091 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1092 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1093 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1094 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1095 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1097 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1101 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1102 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1103 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1105 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1106 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1107 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1108 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1111 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1115 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1116 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1117 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1118 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1119 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1120 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1121 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1123 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1124 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1125 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1126 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1127 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1128 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1129 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1130 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1132 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1133 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1134 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1137 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1141 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1142 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1144 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1145 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1146 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1148 ** Improved robustness
1150 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1151 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1152 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1155 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1159 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1160 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1161 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1162 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1163 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1165 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1169 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1172 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1176 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1177 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1178 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1179 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1181 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1182 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1184 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1185 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1186 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1189 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1191 ** Improved robustness
1193 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1194 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1196 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1197 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1198 or NFS-mounted partition.
1200 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1201 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1205 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1206 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1207 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1208 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1209 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1210 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1212 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1213 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1215 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1216 or neglect to report file removal.
1218 For the "groups" command:
1220 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1221 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1223 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1225 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1227 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1231 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1232 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1235 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1237 ** Changes in behavior
1239 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1240 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1241 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1242 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1244 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1245 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1246 a final `./' or `../' component.
1248 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1249 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1250 this only for pipes.
1252 ** Infrastructure changes
1254 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1255 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1256 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1257 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1261 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1262 name is "." or "..".
1264 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1265 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1266 dirent.d_type support.
1268 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1269 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1271 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1272 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1273 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1274 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1277 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1279 ** Changes in behavior
1281 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1285 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1286 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1290 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1291 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1292 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1294 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1295 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1297 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1298 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1300 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1302 ** Improved robustness
1304 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1305 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1306 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1308 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1309 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1312 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1313 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1315 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1316 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1318 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1319 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1321 ** Changes in behavior
1323 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1324 where the two are distinct.
1326 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1327 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1328 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1329 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1330 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1331 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1332 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1333 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1334 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1335 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1336 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1337 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1338 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1339 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1340 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1341 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1342 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1344 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1345 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1346 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1348 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1349 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1350 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1351 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1354 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1355 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1359 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1360 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1361 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1362 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1364 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1365 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1366 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1368 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1369 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1370 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1371 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1372 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1375 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1376 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1378 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1379 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1380 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1381 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1383 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1384 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1385 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1387 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1388 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1389 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1390 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1392 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1393 and sticky) with the -m option.
1395 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1396 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1397 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1398 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1399 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1401 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1402 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1404 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1408 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1409 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1410 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1411 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1413 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1415 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1417 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1418 silently ignoring one of them.
1420 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1421 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1422 containing this change was 5.92.
1424 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1425 automatically newline terminated.
1427 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1428 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1429 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1430 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1433 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1434 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1435 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1438 ** Scheduled for removal
1440 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1441 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1443 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1444 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1445 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1446 command to unlink a directory.
1448 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1449 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1450 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1451 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1455 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1456 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1457 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1458 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1459 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1460 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1464 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1465 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1467 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1469 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1470 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1471 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1473 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1474 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1477 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1478 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1480 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1481 list directories before files.
1483 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1484 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1485 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1486 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1489 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1491 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1493 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1494 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1495 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1497 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1498 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1502 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1503 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1504 usually printing nothing.
1506 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1508 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1509 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1510 them with hard-linked directories.
1512 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1513 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1514 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1516 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1517 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1518 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1520 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1523 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1524 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1526 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1527 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1529 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1530 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1532 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1533 all command-line arguments.
1535 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1537 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1539 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1540 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1542 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1544 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1545 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1546 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1547 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1548 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1550 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1551 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1553 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1554 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1555 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1556 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1558 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1560 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1564 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1565 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1567 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1568 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1570 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1571 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1573 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1574 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1576 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1577 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1579 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1581 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1582 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1583 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1586 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1588 ** Build-related bug fixes
1590 installing .mo files would fail
1593 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1597 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1599 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1602 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1606 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1607 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1611 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1613 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1614 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1616 ** Deprecated options
1618 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1619 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1621 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1625 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1627 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1628 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1629 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1630 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1632 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1635 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1641 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1646 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1648 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1650 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1651 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1652 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1654 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1655 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1656 problematic usages. These include:
1658 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1659 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1660 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1661 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1662 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1663 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1664 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1665 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1666 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1668 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1669 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1671 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1672 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1673 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1674 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1676 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1677 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1678 between binary and text files.
1680 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1684 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1688 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1689 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1691 head tac tail tee tr
1692 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1694 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1695 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1697 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1698 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1699 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1701 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1703 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1705 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1706 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1707 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1711 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1713 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1714 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1716 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1717 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1718 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1722 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1723 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1727 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1728 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1729 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1733 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1734 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1738 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1740 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1742 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1746 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1747 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1748 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1750 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1751 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1752 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1753 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1754 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1756 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1760 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1761 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1762 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1764 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1766 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1767 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1768 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1769 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1771 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1773 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1774 rather than silently wrapping around.
1776 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1777 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1779 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1780 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1782 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1783 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1784 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1785 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1787 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1789 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1791 ** Improved robustness
1793 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1794 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1795 no matter how large the result.
1797 ** Improved portability
1799 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1800 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1802 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1804 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1805 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1806 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1808 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1809 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1813 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1814 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1816 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1818 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1819 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1820 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1821 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1823 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1824 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1826 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1827 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1828 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1830 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1832 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1833 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1835 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1836 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1838 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1840 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1841 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1843 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1844 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1846 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1847 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1848 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1850 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1852 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1854 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1858 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1860 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1861 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1862 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1864 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1865 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1867 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1868 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1869 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1871 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1872 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1874 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1875 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1876 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1877 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1879 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1880 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1882 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1883 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1884 the file system does not support it.
1886 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1888 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1889 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1891 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1893 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1894 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1896 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1897 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1898 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1899 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1901 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1902 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1905 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1906 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1907 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1908 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1910 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1911 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1912 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1913 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1915 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1916 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1918 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1920 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1921 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1922 reporting incorrect results.
1926 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1927 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1929 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1932 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1934 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1935 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1937 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1938 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1940 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1943 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1944 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1945 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1946 the file name does not look like a page range.
1948 printf has several changes:
1950 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1951 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1953 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1954 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1955 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1957 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1958 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1961 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1962 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1964 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1965 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1967 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1969 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1970 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1972 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1974 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1976 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1977 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1978 when first encountering the directory.
1982 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1983 output; POSIX requires this.
1985 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1986 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1988 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1990 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1991 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1993 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1994 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1996 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1997 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1998 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1999 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2000 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2001 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2002 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2004 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2005 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2006 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2008 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2009 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2011 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2013 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2015 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2016 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2017 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2018 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2020 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2024 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2025 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2026 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2027 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2028 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2030 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2031 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2032 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2034 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2035 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2037 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2038 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2040 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2041 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2042 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2043 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2044 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2046 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2047 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2049 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2050 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2052 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2054 nocreat do not create the output file
2055 excl fail if the output file already exists
2056 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2057 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2059 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2061 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2062 direct use direct I/O for data
2063 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2064 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2065 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2066 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2067 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2069 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2071 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2072 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2075 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2076 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2077 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2078 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2079 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2080 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2082 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2083 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2085 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2088 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2090 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2092 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2093 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2095 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2096 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2097 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2099 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2100 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2101 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2103 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2105 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2106 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2108 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2109 for compatibility with bash.
2111 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2113 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2114 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2115 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2116 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2118 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2119 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2121 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2122 ls supports TABSIZE.
2123 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2124 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2125 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2127 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2130 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2132 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2133 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2134 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2135 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2136 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2137 an offset, not as a file name.
2139 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2140 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2142 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2143 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2145 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2146 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2148 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2149 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2150 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2152 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2153 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2155 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2156 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2160 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2162 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2164 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2168 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2169 or more arguments between partitions.
2171 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2172 holes in the destination.
2174 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2175 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2176 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2177 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2178 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2179 terminates immediately.
2181 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2183 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2185 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2186 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2187 not the empty string.
2189 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2190 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2194 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2195 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2196 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2199 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2206 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2210 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2211 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2213 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2214 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2216 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2217 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2218 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2221 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2225 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2226 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2228 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2229 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2231 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2232 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2233 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2235 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2237 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2240 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2242 ** Configuration option
2244 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2245 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2249 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2250 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2254 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2255 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2256 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2259 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2260 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2261 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2262 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2263 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2264 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2265 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2268 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2272 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2273 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2274 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2276 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2277 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2279 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2281 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2282 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2283 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2284 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2286 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2288 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2289 not just the ones that reference directories
2291 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2292 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2294 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2295 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2296 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2298 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2299 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2300 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2301 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2302 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2303 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2305 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2310 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2311 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2313 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2315 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2317 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2319 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2320 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2322 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2323 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2325 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2327 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2331 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2333 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2335 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2336 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2337 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2338 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2339 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2341 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2342 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2344 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2345 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2347 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2348 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2350 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2351 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2352 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2356 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2357 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2358 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2359 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2360 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2361 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2362 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2363 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2364 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2365 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2366 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2367 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2368 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2369 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2371 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2373 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2374 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2376 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2378 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2380 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2381 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2383 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2385 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2386 without a trailing newline.
2388 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2389 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2391 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2394 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2398 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2400 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2402 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2403 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2404 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2405 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2407 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2409 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2410 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2411 be printed without leading spaces.
2413 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2414 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2419 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2420 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2421 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2423 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2425 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2426 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2428 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2429 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2431 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2432 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2434 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2436 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2438 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2440 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2441 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2443 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2445 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2447 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2448 byte offsets are specified.
2451 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2454 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2457 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2458 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2459 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2460 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2461 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2462 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2463 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2464 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2465 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2466 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2467 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2468 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2469 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2470 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2471 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2472 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2473 directory where M has write access.
2474 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2475 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2476 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2479 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2480 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2481 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2482 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2483 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2484 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2485 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2486 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2487 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2488 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2489 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2490 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2491 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2492 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2493 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2494 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2495 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2496 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2497 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2498 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2499 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2500 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2501 appeared one additional time.
2503 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2504 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2505 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2506 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2509 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2510 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2511 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2512 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2513 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2514 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2515 if there were more than 338.
2517 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2518 - false --help now exits nonzero
2521 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2522 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2523 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2524 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2527 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2528 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2529 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2530 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2531 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2534 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2535 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2536 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2537 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2538 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2539 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2540 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2543 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2544 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2545 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2546 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2547 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2548 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2550 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2551 under certain unusual conditions
2552 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2553 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2556 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2557 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2558 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2559 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2560 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2561 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2562 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2563 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2564 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2565 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2566 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2567 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2568 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2569 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2570 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2571 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2574 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2575 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2578 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2579 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2580 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2581 involving hard-linked directories
2582 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2583 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2584 character-special and block files
2587 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2588 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2589 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2590 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2591 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2592 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2593 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2594 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2595 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2597 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2598 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2599 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2600 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2601 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2602 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2603 specified on the command line.
2604 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2605 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2606 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2607 the first file untouched.
2608 * readlink: new program
2609 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2610 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2611 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2612 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2613 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2614 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2617 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2618 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2619 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2620 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2621 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2622 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2623 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2624 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2625 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2626 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2627 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2628 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2630 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2631 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2632 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2634 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2635 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2636 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2637 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2638 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2639 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2640 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2641 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2644 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2645 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2648 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2649 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2650 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2651 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2652 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2653 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2654 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2657 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2658 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2660 ========================================================================
2661 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2662 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2665 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2667 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2668 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2669 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2670 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2671 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2672 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2673 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2674 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2675 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2676 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2677 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2678 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2680 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2681 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2682 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2683 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2685 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2688 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2690 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2691 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2692 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2693 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2694 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2695 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2696 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2699 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2700 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2701 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2702 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2703 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2704 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2705 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2706 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2707 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2708 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2709 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2710 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2711 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2712 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2713 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2714 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2716 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2717 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2719 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2720 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2721 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2722 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2723 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2724 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2726 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2727 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2728 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2729 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2730 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2731 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2732 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2734 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2735 the source files in the following example:
2736 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2737 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2738 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2739 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2740 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2741 links between source files with --preserve=links
2742 * cp accepts new options:
2743 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2744 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2745 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2746 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2747 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2748 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2749 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2750 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2751 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2753 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2754 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2755 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2756 even though it's older than dest.
2757 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2758 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2759 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2760 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2761 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2763 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2764 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2765 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2766 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2767 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2768 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2769 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2771 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2772 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2773 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2775 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2776 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2777 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2778 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2779 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2780 This is the default.
2782 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2783 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2784 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2785 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2786 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2788 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2791 ========================================================================
2792 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2793 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2796 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2797 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2799 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2800 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2801 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2802 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2803 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2805 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2806 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2807 that specifies a non-directory
2810 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2811 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2812 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2813 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2814 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2815 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2816 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2817 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2818 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2819 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2820 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2821 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2822 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2823 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2824 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2825 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2826 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2827 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2828 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2829 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2830 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2831 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2832 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2833 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2835 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2836 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2837 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2839 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2841 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2842 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2844 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2845 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2846 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2847 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2848 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2850 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2851 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2852 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2853 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2854 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2856 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2858 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2859 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2860 * still more portability fixes
2861 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2862 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2864 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2866 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2868 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2870 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2871 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2872 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2873 there is any time remaining
2874 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2876 ========================================================================
2877 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2878 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2880 This package began as the union of the following:
2881 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2883 ========================================================================
2885 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2887 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2888 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
2889 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2890 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2891 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2892 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.