1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
8 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
10 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
11 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
13 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
14 additional static suffix to output file names.
18 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
19 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
20 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
21 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
22 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
23 typically still point to one of the hard links.
25 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
26 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
27 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
28 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
29 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
33 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
34 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
35 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
38 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
42 realpath: print resolved file names.
46 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
49 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
52 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
53 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
54 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
55 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
56 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
59 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
60 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
61 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
63 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
64 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
65 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
67 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
68 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
69 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
70 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
71 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
73 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
75 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
78 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
79 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
80 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
82 ** Changes in behavior
84 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
85 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
86 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
87 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
88 usually-short referent instead.
90 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
91 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
92 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
93 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
96 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
100 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
101 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
102 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
104 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
107 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
108 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
112 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
113 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
115 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
116 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
117 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
118 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
120 ** Changes in behavior
122 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
123 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
124 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
128 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
129 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
130 only .tar.xz files is enough.
133 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
137 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
138 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
139 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
141 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
142 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
144 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
145 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
146 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
147 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
148 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
150 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
151 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
152 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
153 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
154 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
155 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
156 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
157 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
159 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
160 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
162 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
163 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
165 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
168 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
169 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
170 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
172 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
173 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
174 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
177 ** Changes in behavior
179 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
180 when -v or -c specified.
182 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
183 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
187 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
188 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
189 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
190 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
191 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
193 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
194 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
195 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
197 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
198 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
199 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
200 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
201 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
202 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
203 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
205 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
206 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
207 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
211 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
212 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
214 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
217 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
218 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
220 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
221 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
223 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
224 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
226 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
228 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
232 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
233 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
235 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
238 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
242 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
243 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
245 ** Changes in behavior
247 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
248 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
249 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
250 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
251 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
252 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
254 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
255 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
256 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
260 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
267 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
268 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
271 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
272 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
275 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
276 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
279 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
282 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
285 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
288 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
293 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
294 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
295 processed portion thereof.
297 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
298 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
300 ** Changes in behavior
302 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
303 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
304 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
306 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
307 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
308 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
310 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
311 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
313 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
314 Use --preserve-context instead.
316 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
319 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
323 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
324 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
325 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
326 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
329 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
330 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
332 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
333 reject file names invalid for that file system.
335 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
340 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
341 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
342 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
343 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
344 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
345 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
346 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
347 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
349 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
350 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
351 the same number of fields are output for each line.
353 ** Changes in behavior
355 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
356 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
357 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
360 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
364 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
365 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
369 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
373 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
374 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
376 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
377 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
379 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
380 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
382 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
383 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
384 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
387 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
388 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
390 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
391 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
392 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
394 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
396 ** Changes in behavior
398 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
399 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
400 to the number of available processors.
404 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
407 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
411 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
412 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
413 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
414 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
416 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
417 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
418 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
420 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
421 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
423 ** Changes in behavior
425 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
426 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
428 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
429 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
430 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
431 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
432 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
433 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
435 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
436 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
437 the same way as the others.
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
444 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
445 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
446 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
448 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
449 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
451 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
452 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
453 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
455 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
458 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
461 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
462 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
463 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
465 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
466 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
467 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
468 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
472 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
473 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
475 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
478 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
479 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
481 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
483 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
484 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
485 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
487 ** Changes in behavior
489 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
490 rather than its aliased target.
492 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
493 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
494 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
496 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
497 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
498 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
499 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
500 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
501 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
502 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
503 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
505 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
507 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
509 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
510 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
513 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
514 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
515 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
516 control like taskset for example.
518 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
520 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
521 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
522 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
523 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
524 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
525 includes %C when context information is available.
527 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
528 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
529 rather than a file system attribute.
531 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
532 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
533 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
534 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
536 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
537 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
538 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
540 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
541 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
542 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
545 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
549 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
552 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
554 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
557 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
558 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
559 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
560 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
562 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
563 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
568 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
569 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
571 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
572 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
573 duration after the initial signal was sent.
575 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
576 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
577 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
578 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
579 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
580 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
581 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
582 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
583 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
585 ** Changes in behavior
587 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
588 sequence when it would be a no-op.
590 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
591 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
594 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
598 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
599 of available processors, which may not have been the case
600 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
605 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
606 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
608 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
609 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
610 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
611 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
613 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
614 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
615 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
618 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
622 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
623 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
626 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
627 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
628 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
630 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
633 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
634 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
635 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
638 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
639 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
642 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
643 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
644 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
645 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
647 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
648 renamed-aside and then recreated.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
651 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
652 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
653 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
656 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
657 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
658 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
660 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
661 processes will not intersperse their output.
662 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
665 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
669 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
672 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
675 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
676 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
677 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
678 the presence of the empty string argument.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
681 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
682 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
683 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
684 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
686 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
689 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
690 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
691 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
693 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
694 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
695 and with a malicious user on the same system
696 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
700 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
704 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
705 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
708 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
709 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
710 offending directory and all "contents."
712 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
713 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
714 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
716 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
717 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
718 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
720 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
721 processes will not intersperse their output.
722 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
723 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
725 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
726 output the name of the file to stdout.
727 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
729 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
730 call fails with errno == EACCES.
731 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
733 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
734 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
737 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
738 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
739 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
741 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
742 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
743 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
744 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
745 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
746 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
748 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
749 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
750 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
751 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
753 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
754 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
756 ** Changes in behavior
758 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
759 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
760 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
761 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
762 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
764 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
765 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
766 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
767 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
769 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
771 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
772 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
773 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
774 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
775 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
779 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
783 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
784 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
786 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
787 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
789 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
790 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
791 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
793 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
794 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
797 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
801 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
802 when the source file doesn't have write access.
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
805 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
806 to accommodate leap seconds.
807 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
809 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
810 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
811 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
813 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
815 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
816 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
817 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
819 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
820 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
821 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
822 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
823 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
827 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
828 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
829 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
830 directory or a symlink to a directory.
832 ** Changes in behavior
834 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
835 environment variable is set.
837 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
838 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
839 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
843 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
844 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
845 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
846 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
848 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
849 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
850 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
851 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
855 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
856 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
857 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
859 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
860 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
861 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
862 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
863 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
864 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
867 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
868 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
871 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
875 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
876 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
877 and libraries tested at configure time.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
880 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
883 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
886 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
887 printing a summary to stderr.
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
890 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
891 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
892 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
894 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
895 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
897 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
898 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
899 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
900 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
902 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
903 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
904 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
905 which is relatively unusual.
906 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
908 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
909 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
910 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
911 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
912 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
913 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
914 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
918 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
919 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
920 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
921 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
922 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
926 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
927 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
929 ** Changes in behavior
931 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
932 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
933 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
934 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
935 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
938 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
942 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
943 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
945 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
946 before data copying has started.
948 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
949 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
951 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
952 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
953 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
954 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
956 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
957 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
958 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
959 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
961 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
966 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
967 for its standard streams.
969 ** Changes in behavior
971 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
972 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
973 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
974 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
975 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
976 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
978 ** Deprecated options
980 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
981 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
985 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
987 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
988 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
991 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
993 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
994 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
996 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
997 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1000 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1004 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1005 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1006 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1007 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1009 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1010 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1011 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1012 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1013 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1018 make check: two tests have been corrected
1022 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1023 inherited from gnulib.
1026 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1030 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1031 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1032 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1033 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1035 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1036 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1038 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1040 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1041 systems without xattr support.
1043 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1044 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1045 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1047 ** Changes in behavior
1049 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1050 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1051 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1052 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1054 ** Improved robustness
1056 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1057 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1058 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1059 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1060 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1061 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1062 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1063 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1064 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1068 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1069 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1071 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1072 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1073 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1074 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1075 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1082 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1083 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1084 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1088 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1089 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1090 data was read, or on process exit.
1091 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1093 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1094 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1095 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1098 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1099 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1100 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1103 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1104 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1106 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1109 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1110 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1111 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1113 ** Changes in behavior
1115 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1116 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1117 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1119 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1120 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1122 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1123 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1124 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1127 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1131 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1133 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1134 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1135 install: Never copies xattrs
1137 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1138 from overwriting any existing destination file
1140 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1141 mode where this feature is available.
1143 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1144 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1145 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1146 do not modify the destination at all.
1148 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1150 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1154 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1157 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1159 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1160 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1162 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1163 processing the first file name
1165 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1166 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1167 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1168 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1170 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1171 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1173 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1174 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1177 ** Changes in behavior
1179 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1180 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1182 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1183 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1184 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1186 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1187 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1189 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1191 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1192 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1193 is still marked with a '+'.
1196 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1200 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1201 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1205 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1206 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1207 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1208 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1209 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1210 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1212 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1213 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1215 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1216 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1218 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1220 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1221 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1222 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1224 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1225 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1227 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1228 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1229 used to factor large numbers.
1231 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1234 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1236 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1238 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1239 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1241 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1242 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1243 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1244 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1246 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1247 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1248 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1250 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1251 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1255 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1257 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1258 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1260 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1261 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1263 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1265 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1266 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1270 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1271 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1272 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1274 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1276 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1277 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1278 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1280 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1281 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1282 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1284 ** Changes in behavior
1286 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1287 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1290 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1294 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1295 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1296 'futimens' system calls.
1300 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1302 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1303 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1304 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1306 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1307 with no USERNAME argument.
1309 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1310 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1311 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1313 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1314 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1315 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1316 number of fields for some inputs.
1318 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1319 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1321 ** Changes in behavior
1323 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1324 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1327 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1331 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1333 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1334 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1335 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1336 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1338 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1339 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1341 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1342 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1344 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1345 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1347 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1348 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1349 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1350 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1352 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1353 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1354 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1355 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1356 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1357 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1359 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1360 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1362 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1363 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1366 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1367 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1369 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1370 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1372 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1373 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1374 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1375 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1377 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1378 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1380 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1381 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1383 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1384 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1385 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1389 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1390 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1392 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1393 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1394 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1395 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1399 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1400 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1402 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1404 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1408 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1409 which have negative errno values.
1413 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1417 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1421 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1425 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1429 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1430 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1431 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1433 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1434 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1435 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1440 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1441 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1442 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1443 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1446 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1450 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1452 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1453 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1454 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1457 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1461 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1462 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1464 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1466 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1468 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1470 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1474 ** Changes in behavior
1476 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1477 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1479 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1480 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1482 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1483 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1484 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1488 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1489 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1490 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1491 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1492 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1493 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1494 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1495 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1496 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1497 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1498 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1500 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1501 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1502 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1505 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1508 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1509 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1510 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1512 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1513 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1514 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1517 ** New build options
1519 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1520 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1521 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1522 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1524 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1525 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1526 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1527 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1528 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1529 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1530 of "make check" fail.
1532 ** Remove deprecated options
1534 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1535 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1536 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1537 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1538 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1540 ** Improved robustness
1542 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1543 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1544 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1545 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1546 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1547 loss of the contents of a/f.
1549 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1550 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1554 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1555 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1556 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1558 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1559 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1560 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1561 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1563 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1564 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1565 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1566 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1567 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1568 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1569 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1570 destination is a symlink.
1572 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1574 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1575 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1577 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1578 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1580 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1582 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1583 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1585 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1586 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1588 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1591 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1592 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1594 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1595 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1597 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1598 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1599 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1600 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1602 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1603 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1604 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1606 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1607 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1608 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1610 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1611 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1612 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1613 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1615 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1616 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1617 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1619 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1620 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1622 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1623 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1625 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1627 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1628 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1629 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1631 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1632 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1634 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1635 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1637 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1638 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1640 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1641 [present in the original version]
1644 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1648 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1650 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1651 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1652 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1654 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1655 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1657 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1661 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1662 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1664 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1665 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1667 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1668 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1670 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1671 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1672 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1673 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1674 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1675 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1677 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1678 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1681 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1682 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1684 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1687 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1688 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1689 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1691 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1692 directory is unreadable.
1694 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1695 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1696 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1698 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1699 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1700 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1701 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1702 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1705 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1706 Before it would print nothing.
1708 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1710 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1711 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1712 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1713 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1714 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1715 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1716 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1717 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1719 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1723 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1724 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1725 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1727 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1728 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1729 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1730 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1733 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1737 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1738 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1739 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1740 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1741 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1742 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1743 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1745 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1746 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1747 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1748 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1749 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1750 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1751 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1752 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1754 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1755 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1756 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1763 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1764 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1766 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1767 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1768 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1770 ** Improved robustness
1772 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1773 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1774 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1777 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1781 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1782 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1783 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1784 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1785 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1787 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1791 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1794 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1798 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1799 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1800 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1801 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1803 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1804 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1806 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1807 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1808 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1811 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1813 ** Improved robustness
1815 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1816 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1818 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1819 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1820 or NFS-mounted partition.
1822 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1823 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1827 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1828 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1829 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1830 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1831 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1832 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1834 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1835 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1837 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1838 or neglect to report file removal.
1840 For the "groups" command:
1842 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1843 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1845 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1847 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1849 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1853 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1854 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1857 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1859 ** Changes in behavior
1861 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1862 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1863 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1864 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1866 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1867 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1868 a final './' or '../' component.
1870 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1871 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1872 this only for pipes.
1874 ** Infrastructure changes
1876 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1877 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1878 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1879 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1883 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1884 name is "." or "..".
1886 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1887 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1888 dirent.d_type support.
1890 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1891 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1893 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1894 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1895 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1896 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1899 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1901 ** Changes in behavior
1903 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1907 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1908 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1912 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1913 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1914 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1916 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1917 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1919 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1920 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1922 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1924 ** Improved robustness
1926 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1927 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1928 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1930 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1931 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1934 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1935 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1937 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1938 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1940 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1941 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1943 ** Changes in behavior
1945 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1946 where the two are distinct.
1948 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1949 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1950 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1951 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1952 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1953 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1954 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1955 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1956 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1957 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1958 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1959 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1960 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
1961 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
1962 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
1963 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1964 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1966 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1967 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1968 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1970 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1971 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1972 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1973 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1976 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1977 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1981 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1982 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1983 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1984 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1986 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1987 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1988 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1990 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1991 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1992 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1993 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1994 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1997 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1998 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2000 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2001 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2002 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2003 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2005 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2006 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2007 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2009 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2010 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2011 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2012 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2014 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2015 and sticky) with the -m option.
2017 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2018 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2019 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2020 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2021 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2023 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2024 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2026 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2030 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2031 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2032 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2033 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2035 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2037 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2039 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2040 silently ignoring one of them.
2042 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2043 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2044 containing this change was 5.92.
2046 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2047 automatically newline terminated.
2049 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2050 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2051 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2052 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2055 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2056 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2057 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2060 ** Scheduled for removal
2062 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2063 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2065 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2066 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2067 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2068 command to unlink a directory.
2070 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2071 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2072 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2073 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2077 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2078 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2079 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2080 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2081 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2082 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2086 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2087 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2089 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2091 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2092 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2093 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2095 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2096 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2099 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2100 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2102 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2103 list directories before files.
2105 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2106 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2107 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2108 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2111 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2113 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2115 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2116 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2117 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2119 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2120 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2124 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2125 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2126 usually printing nothing.
2128 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2130 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2131 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2132 them with hard-linked directories.
2134 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2135 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2136 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2138 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2139 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2140 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2142 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2145 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2146 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2148 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2149 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2151 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2152 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2154 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2155 all command-line arguments.
2157 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2159 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2161 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2162 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2164 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2166 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2167 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2168 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2169 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2170 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2172 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2173 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2175 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2176 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2177 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2178 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2180 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2182 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2186 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2187 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2189 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2190 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2192 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2193 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2195 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2196 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2198 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2199 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2201 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2203 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2204 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2205 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2208 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2210 ** Build-related bug fixes
2212 installing .mo files would fail
2215 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2219 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2221 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2224 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2228 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2229 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2233 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2235 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2236 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2238 ** Deprecated options
2240 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2241 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2243 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2247 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2249 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2250 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2251 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2252 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2254 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2257 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2263 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2268 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2270 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2272 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2273 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2274 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2276 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2277 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2278 problematic usages. These include:
2280 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2281 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2282 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2283 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2284 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2285 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2286 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2287 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2288 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2290 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2291 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2293 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2294 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2295 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2296 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2298 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2299 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2300 between binary and text files.
2302 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2306 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2310 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2311 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2313 head tac tail tee tr
2314 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2316 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2317 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2319 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2320 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2321 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2323 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2325 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2327 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2328 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2329 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2333 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2335 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2336 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2338 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2339 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2340 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2344 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2345 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2349 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2350 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2351 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2355 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2356 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2360 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2362 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2364 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2368 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2369 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2370 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2372 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2373 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2374 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2375 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2376 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2378 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2382 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2383 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2384 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2386 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2388 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2389 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2390 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2391 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2393 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2395 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2396 rather than silently wrapping around.
2398 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2399 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2401 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2402 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2404 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2405 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2406 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2407 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2409 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2411 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2413 ** Improved robustness
2415 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2416 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2417 no matter how large the result.
2419 ** Improved portability
2421 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2422 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2424 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2426 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2427 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2428 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2430 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2431 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2435 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2436 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2438 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2440 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2441 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2442 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2443 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2445 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2446 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2448 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2449 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2450 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2452 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2454 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2455 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2457 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2458 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2460 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2462 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2463 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2465 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2466 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2468 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2469 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2470 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2472 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2474 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2476 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2480 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2482 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2483 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2484 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2486 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2487 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2489 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2490 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2491 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2493 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2494 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2496 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2497 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2498 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2499 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2501 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2502 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2504 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2505 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2506 the file system does not support it.
2508 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2510 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2511 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2513 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2515 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2516 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2518 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2519 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2520 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2521 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2523 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2524 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2527 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2528 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2529 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2530 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2532 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2533 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2534 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2535 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2537 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2538 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2540 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2542 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2543 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2544 reporting incorrect results.
2548 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2549 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2551 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2554 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2556 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2557 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2559 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2560 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2562 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2565 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2566 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2567 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2568 the file name does not look like a page range.
2570 printf has several changes:
2572 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2573 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2575 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2576 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2577 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2579 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2580 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2583 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2584 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2586 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2587 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2589 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2591 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2592 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2594 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2596 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2598 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2599 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2600 when first encountering the directory.
2604 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2605 output; POSIX requires this.
2607 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2608 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2610 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2612 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2613 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2615 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2616 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2618 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2619 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2620 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2621 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2622 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2623 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2624 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2626 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2627 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2628 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2630 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2631 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2633 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2635 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2637 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2638 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2639 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2640 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2642 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2646 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2647 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2648 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2649 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2650 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2652 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2653 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2654 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2656 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2657 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2659 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2660 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2662 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2663 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2664 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2665 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2666 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2668 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2669 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2671 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2672 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2674 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2676 nocreat do not create the output file
2677 excl fail if the output file already exists
2678 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2679 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2681 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2683 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2684 direct use direct I/O for data
2685 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2686 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2687 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2688 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2689 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2691 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2693 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2694 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2697 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2698 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2699 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2700 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2701 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2702 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2704 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2705 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2707 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2710 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2712 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2714 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2715 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2717 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2718 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2719 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2721 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2722 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2723 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2725 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2727 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2728 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2730 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2731 for compatibility with bash.
2733 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2735 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2736 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2737 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2738 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2740 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2741 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2743 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2744 ls supports TABSIZE.
2745 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2746 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2747 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2749 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2752 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2754 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2755 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2756 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2757 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2758 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2759 an offset, not as a file name.
2761 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2762 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2764 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2765 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2767 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2768 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2770 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2771 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2772 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2774 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2775 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2777 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2778 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2782 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2784 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2786 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2790 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2791 or more arguments between partitions.
2793 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2794 holes in the destination.
2796 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2797 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2798 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2799 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2800 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2801 terminates immediately.
2803 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2805 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2807 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2808 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2809 not the empty string.
2811 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2812 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2816 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2817 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2818 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2821 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2828 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2832 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2833 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2835 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2836 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2838 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2839 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2840 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2843 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2847 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2848 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2850 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2851 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2853 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2854 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2855 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2857 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2859 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2862 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2864 ** Configuration option
2866 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2867 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2871 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2872 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2876 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2877 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2878 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2881 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2882 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2883 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2884 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2885 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2886 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2887 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2890 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2894 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2895 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2896 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2898 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2899 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2901 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2903 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2904 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2905 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2906 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2908 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2910 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2911 not just the ones that reference directories
2913 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2914 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2916 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2917 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2918 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2920 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2921 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2922 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2923 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2924 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2925 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2927 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2932 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2933 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2935 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2937 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2939 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2941 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2942 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2944 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2945 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2947 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2949 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2953 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2955 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2957 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2958 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2959 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2960 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2961 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2963 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2964 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2966 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2967 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2969 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2970 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2972 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
2973 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2974 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2978 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
2979 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2980 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
2981 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2982 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2983 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2984 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2985 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2986 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2987 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2988 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2989 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2990 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2991 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2993 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
2995 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2996 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2998 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3000 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3002 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3003 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3005 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3007 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3008 without a trailing newline.
3010 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3011 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3013 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3016 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3020 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3022 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3024 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3025 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3026 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3027 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3029 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3031 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3032 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3033 be printed without leading spaces.
3035 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3036 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3041 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3042 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3043 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3045 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3047 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3048 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3050 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3051 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3053 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3054 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3056 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3058 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3060 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3062 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3063 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3065 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3067 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3069 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3070 byte offsets are specified.
3073 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3076 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3079 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3080 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3081 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3082 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3083 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3084 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3085 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3086 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3087 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3088 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3089 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3090 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3091 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3092 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3093 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3094 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3095 directory where M has write access.
3096 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3097 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3098 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3101 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3102 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3103 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3104 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3105 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3106 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3107 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3108 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3109 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3110 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3111 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3112 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3113 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3114 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3115 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3116 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3117 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3118 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3119 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3120 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3121 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3122 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3123 appeared one additional time.
3125 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3126 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3127 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3128 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3131 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3132 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3133 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3134 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3135 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3136 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3137 if there were more than 338.
3139 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3140 - false --help now exits nonzero
3143 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3144 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3145 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3146 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3149 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3150 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3151 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3152 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3153 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3156 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3157 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3158 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3159 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3160 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3161 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3162 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3165 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3166 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3167 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3168 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3169 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3170 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3172 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3173 under certain unusual conditions
3174 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3175 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3178 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3179 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3180 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3181 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3182 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3183 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3184 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3185 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3186 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3187 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3188 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3189 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3190 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3191 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3192 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3193 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3196 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3197 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3200 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3201 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3202 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3203 involving hard-linked directories
3204 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3205 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3206 character-special and block files
3209 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3210 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3211 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3212 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3213 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3214 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3215 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3216 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3217 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3219 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3220 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3221 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3222 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3223 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3224 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3225 specified on the command line.
3226 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3227 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3228 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3229 the first file untouched.
3230 * readlink: new program
3231 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3232 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3233 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3234 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3235 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3236 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3239 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3240 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3241 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3242 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3243 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3244 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3245 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3246 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3247 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3248 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3249 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3250 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3252 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3253 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3254 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3256 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3257 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3258 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3259 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3260 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3261 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3262 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3263 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3266 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3267 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3270 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3271 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3272 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3273 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3274 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3275 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3276 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3279 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3280 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3282 ========================================================================
3283 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3284 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3287 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3289 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3290 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3291 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3292 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3293 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3294 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3295 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3296 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3297 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3298 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3299 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3300 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3302 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3303 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3304 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3305 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3307 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3310 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3312 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3313 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3314 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3315 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3316 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3317 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3318 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3321 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3322 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3323 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3324 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3325 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3326 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3327 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3328 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3329 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3330 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3331 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3332 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3333 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3334 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3335 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3336 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3338 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3339 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3341 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3342 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3343 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3344 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3345 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3346 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3348 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3349 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3350 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3351 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3352 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3353 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3354 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3356 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3357 the source files in the following example:
3358 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3359 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3360 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3361 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3362 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3363 links between source files with --preserve=links
3364 * cp accepts new options:
3365 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3366 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3367 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3368 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3369 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3370 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3371 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3372 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3373 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3375 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3376 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3377 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3378 even though it's older than dest.
3379 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3380 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3381 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3382 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3383 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3385 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3386 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3387 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3388 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3389 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3390 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3391 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3393 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3394 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3395 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3397 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3398 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3399 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3400 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3401 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3402 This is the default.
3404 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3405 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3406 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3407 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3408 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3410 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3413 ========================================================================
3414 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3415 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3418 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3419 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3421 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3422 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3423 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3424 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3425 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3427 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3428 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3429 that specifies a non-directory
3432 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3433 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3434 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3435 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3436 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3437 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3438 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3439 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3440 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3441 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3442 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3443 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3444 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3445 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3446 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3447 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3448 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3449 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3450 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3451 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3452 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3453 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3454 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3455 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3457 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3458 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3459 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3461 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3463 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3464 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3466 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3467 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3468 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3469 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3470 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3472 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3473 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3474 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3475 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3476 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3478 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3480 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3481 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3482 * still more portability fixes
3483 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3484 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3486 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3488 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3490 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3492 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3493 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3494 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3495 there is any time remaining
3496 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3498 ========================================================================
3499 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3500 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3502 This package began as the union of the following:
3503 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3505 ========================================================================
3507 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3509 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3510 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3511 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3512 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3513 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3514 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.