1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
10 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
11 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
12 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
13 the presence of the empty string argument.
14 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
17 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
21 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
22 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
25 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
26 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
27 offending directory and all "contents."
29 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
30 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
31 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
33 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
34 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
35 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
38 processes will not intersperse their output.
39 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
40 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
42 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
43 output the name of the file to stdout.
44 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
46 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
47 call fails with errno == EACCES.
48 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
50 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
51 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
54 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
55 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
56 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
58 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
59 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
60 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
61 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
62 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
63 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
65 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
66 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
67 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
68 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
70 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
71 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
73 ** Changes in behavior
75 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
76 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
77 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
78 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
79 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
81 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
82 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
83 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
84 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
86 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
88 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
89 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
90 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
91 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
92 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
96 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
100 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
101 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
103 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
104 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
106 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
107 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
108 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
110 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
111 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
114 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
118 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
119 when the source file doesn't have write access.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
122 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
123 to accommodate leap seconds.
124 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
126 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
127 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
130 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
132 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
133 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
134 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
136 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
137 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
138 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
139 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
140 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
144 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
145 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
146 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
147 directory or a symlink to a directory.
149 ** Changes in behavior
151 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
152 environment variable is set.
154 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
155 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
156 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
160 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
161 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
162 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
163 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
165 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
166 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
167 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
168 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
172 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
173 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
174 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
176 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
177 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
178 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
179 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
180 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
181 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
184 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
185 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
188 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
192 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
193 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
194 and libraries tested at configure time.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
197 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
200 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
203 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
204 printing a summary to stderr.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
207 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
208 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
209 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
211 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
214 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
215 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
216 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
217 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
219 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
220 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
221 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
222 which is relatively unusual.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
225 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
226 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
227 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
228 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
229 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
230 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
231 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
235 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
236 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
237 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
238 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
239 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
243 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
244 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
246 ** Changes in behavior
248 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
249 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
250 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
251 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
252 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
255 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
259 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
260 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
262 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
263 before data copying has started.
265 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
266 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
268 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
269 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
270 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
271 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
273 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
274 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
275 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
276 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
278 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
283 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
284 for its standard streams.
286 ** Changes in behavior
288 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
289 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
290 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
291 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
292 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
293 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
295 ** Deprecated options
297 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
298 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
302 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
304 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
305 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
308 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
310 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
311 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
313 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
314 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
317 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
321 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
322 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
323 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
324 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
326 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
327 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
328 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
329 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
330 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
335 make check: two tests have been corrected
339 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
340 inherited from gnulib.
343 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
347 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
348 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
349 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
350 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
352 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
353 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
355 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
357 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
358 systems without xattr support.
360 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
361 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
362 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
364 ** Changes in behavior
366 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
367 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
368 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
369 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
371 ** Improved robustness
373 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
374 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
375 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
376 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
377 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
378 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
379 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
380 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
381 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
385 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
386 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
388 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
389 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
390 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
391 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
392 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
395 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
399 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
400 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
401 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
405 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
406 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
407 data was read, or on process exit.
408 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
410 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
411 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
412 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
415 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
416 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
417 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
420 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
421 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
423 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
426 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
427 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
428 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
430 ** Changes in behavior
432 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
433 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
434 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
436 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
437 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
439 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
440 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
441 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
444 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
448 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
450 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
451 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
452 install: Never copies xattrs
454 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
455 from overwriting any existing destination file
457 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
458 mode where this feature is available.
460 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
461 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
462 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
463 do not modify the destination at all.
465 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
467 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
471 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
474 cp uses much less memory in some situations
476 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
477 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
479 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
480 processing the first file name
482 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
483 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
484 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
485 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
487 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
488 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
490 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
491 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
494 ** Changes in behavior
496 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
497 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
499 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
500 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
501 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
503 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
504 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
506 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
508 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
509 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
510 is still marked with a '+'.
513 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
517 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
518 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
522 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
523 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
524 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
525 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
526 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
527 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
529 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
530 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
532 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
533 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
535 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
537 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
538 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
539 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
541 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
542 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
544 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
545 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
546 used to factor large numbers.
548 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
551 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
553 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
555 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
556 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
558 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
559 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
560 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
561 maximum command-line (argv) length.
563 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
564 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
565 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
567 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
568 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
572 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
574 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
575 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
577 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
578 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
580 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
582 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
583 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
587 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
588 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
589 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
591 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
593 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
594 no matter how many files are in a given directory
596 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
597 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
598 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
600 ** Changes in behavior
602 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
603 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
606 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
610 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
612 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
613 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
614 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
616 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
617 with no USERNAME argument.
619 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
620 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
621 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
623 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
624 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
625 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
626 number of fields for some inputs.
628 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
629 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
631 ** Changes in behavior
633 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
634 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
637 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
641 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
643 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
644 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
645 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
646 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
648 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
649 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
651 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
652 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
654 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
655 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
657 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
658 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
659 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
662 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
663 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
664 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
665 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
666 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
667 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
669 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
670 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
672 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
673 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
676 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
677 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
679 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
680 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
682 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
683 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
684 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
685 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
687 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
688 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
690 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
691 in more cases when a directory is empty.
693 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
694 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
699 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
700 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
702 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
703 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
704 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
705 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
709 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
710 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
712 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
714 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
718 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
719 which have negative errno values.
723 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
727 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
731 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
732 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
739 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
740 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
741 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
743 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
744 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
745 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
750 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
751 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
752 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
753 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
756 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
760 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
762 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
763 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
771 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
772 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
774 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
776 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
778 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
780 ** Programs no longer installed by default
784 ** Changes in behavior
786 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
787 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
789 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
790 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
792 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
793 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
794 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
798 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
799 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
800 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
801 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
802 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
803 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
804 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
805 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
806 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
807 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
808 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
810 The following commands and options now support the standard size
811 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
812 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
815 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
818 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
819 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
820 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
822 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
823 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
824 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
829 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
830 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
831 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
832 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
834 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
835 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
836 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
837 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
838 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
839 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
840 of "make check" fail.
842 ** Remove deprecated options
844 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
845 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
846 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
847 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
848 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
850 ** Improved robustness
852 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
853 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
854 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
855 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
856 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
857 loss of the contents of a/f.
859 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
860 in its 35-colon command-line argument
864 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
865 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
868 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
869 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
870 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
871 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
873 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
874 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
875 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
876 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
877 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
878 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
879 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
880 destination is a symlink.
882 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
884 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
885 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
887 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
888 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
890 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
892 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
893 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
895 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
896 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
898 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
901 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
902 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
904 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
905 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
907 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
908 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
909 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
910 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
912 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
913 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
914 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
916 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
917 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
918 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
920 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
921 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
922 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
923 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
925 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
926 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
927 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
929 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
930 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
932 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
933 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
935 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
937 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
938 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
939 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
941 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
942 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
944 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
945 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
947 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
948 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
950 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
951 [present in the original version]
954 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
958 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
960 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
961 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
962 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
964 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
965 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
967 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
971 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
972 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
974 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
975 support but with insufficient /proc support.
977 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
978 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
980 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
981 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
982 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
983 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
984 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
985 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
987 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
988 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
991 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
992 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
994 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
997 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
998 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
999 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1001 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1002 directory is unreadable.
1004 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1005 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1006 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1008 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1009 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1010 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1011 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1012 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1015 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1016 Before it would print nothing.
1018 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1020 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1021 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1022 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1023 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1024 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1025 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1026 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1027 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1029 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1033 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1034 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1035 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1037 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1038 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1039 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1040 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1043 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1047 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1048 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1049 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1050 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1051 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1052 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1053 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1055 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1056 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1057 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1058 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1059 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1060 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1061 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1062 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1064 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1065 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1066 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1069 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1073 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1074 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1076 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1077 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1078 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1080 ** Improved robustness
1082 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1083 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1084 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1087 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1091 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1092 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1093 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1094 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1095 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1097 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1101 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1104 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1108 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1109 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1110 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1111 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1113 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1114 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1116 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1117 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1118 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1121 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1123 ** Improved robustness
1125 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1126 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1128 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1129 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1130 or NFS-mounted partition.
1132 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1133 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1137 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1138 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1139 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1140 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1141 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1142 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1144 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1145 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1147 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1148 or neglect to report file removal.
1150 For the "groups" command:
1152 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1153 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1155 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1157 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1159 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1163 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1164 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1167 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1169 ** Changes in behavior
1171 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1172 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1173 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1174 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1176 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1177 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1178 a final `./' or `../' component.
1180 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1181 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1182 this only for pipes.
1184 ** Infrastructure changes
1186 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1187 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1188 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1189 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1193 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1194 name is "." or "..".
1196 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1197 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1198 dirent.d_type support.
1200 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1201 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1203 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1204 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1205 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1206 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1209 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1211 ** Changes in behavior
1213 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1217 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1218 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1222 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1223 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1224 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1226 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1227 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1229 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1230 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1232 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1234 ** Improved robustness
1236 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1237 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1238 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1240 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1241 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1244 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1245 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1247 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1248 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1250 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1251 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1253 ** Changes in behavior
1255 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1256 where the two are distinct.
1258 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1259 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1260 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1261 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1262 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1263 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1264 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1265 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1266 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1267 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1268 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1269 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1270 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1271 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1272 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1273 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1274 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1276 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1277 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1278 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1280 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1281 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1282 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1283 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1286 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1287 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1291 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1292 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1293 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1294 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1296 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1297 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1298 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1300 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1301 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1302 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1303 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1304 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1307 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1308 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1310 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1311 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1312 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1313 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1315 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1316 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1317 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1319 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1320 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1321 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1322 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1324 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1325 and sticky) with the -m option.
1327 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1328 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1329 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1330 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1331 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1333 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1334 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1336 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1340 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1341 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1342 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1343 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1345 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1347 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1349 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1350 silently ignoring one of them.
1352 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1353 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1354 containing this change was 5.92.
1356 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1357 automatically newline terminated.
1359 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1360 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1361 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1362 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1365 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1366 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1367 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1370 ** Scheduled for removal
1372 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1373 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1375 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1376 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1377 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1378 command to unlink a directory.
1380 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1381 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1382 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1383 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1387 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1388 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1389 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1390 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1391 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1392 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1396 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1397 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1399 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1401 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1402 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1403 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1405 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1406 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1409 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1410 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1412 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1413 list directories before files.
1415 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1416 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1417 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1418 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1421 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1423 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1425 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1426 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1427 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1429 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1430 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1434 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1435 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1436 usually printing nothing.
1438 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1440 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1441 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1442 them with hard-linked directories.
1444 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1445 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1446 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1448 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1449 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1450 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1452 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1455 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1456 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1458 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1459 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1461 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1462 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1464 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1465 all command-line arguments.
1467 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1469 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1471 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1472 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1474 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1476 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1477 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1478 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1479 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1480 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1482 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1483 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1485 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1486 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1487 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1488 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1490 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1492 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1496 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1497 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1499 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1500 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1502 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1503 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1505 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1506 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1508 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1509 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1511 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1513 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1514 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1515 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1518 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1520 ** Build-related bug fixes
1522 installing .mo files would fail
1525 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1529 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1531 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1534 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1538 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1539 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1543 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1545 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1546 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1548 ** Deprecated options
1550 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1551 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1553 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1557 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1559 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1560 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1561 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1562 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1564 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1567 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1573 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1578 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1580 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1582 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1583 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1584 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1586 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1587 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1588 problematic usages. These include:
1590 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1591 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1592 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1593 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1594 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1595 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1596 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1597 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1598 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1600 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1601 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1603 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1604 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1605 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1606 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1608 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1609 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1610 between binary and text files.
1612 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1616 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1620 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1621 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1623 head tac tail tee tr
1624 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1626 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1627 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1629 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1630 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1631 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1633 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1635 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1637 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1638 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1639 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1643 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1645 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1646 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1648 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1649 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1650 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1654 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1655 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1659 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1660 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1661 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1665 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1666 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1670 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1672 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1674 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1678 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1679 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1680 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1682 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1683 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1684 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1685 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1686 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1688 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1692 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1693 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1694 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1696 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1698 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1699 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1700 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1701 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1703 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1705 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1706 rather than silently wrapping around.
1708 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1709 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1711 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1712 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1714 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1715 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1716 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1717 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1719 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1721 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1723 ** Improved robustness
1725 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1726 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1727 no matter how large the result.
1729 ** Improved portability
1731 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1732 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1734 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1736 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1737 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1738 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1740 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1741 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1745 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1746 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1748 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1750 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1751 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1752 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1753 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1755 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1756 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1758 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1759 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1760 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1762 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1764 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1765 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1767 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1768 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1770 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1772 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1773 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1775 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1776 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1778 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1779 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1780 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1782 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1784 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1786 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1790 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1792 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1793 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1794 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1796 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1797 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1799 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1800 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1801 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1803 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1804 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1806 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1807 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1808 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1809 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1811 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1812 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1814 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1815 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1816 the file system does not support it.
1818 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1820 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1821 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1823 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1825 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1826 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1828 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1829 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1830 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1831 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1833 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1834 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1837 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1838 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1839 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1840 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1842 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1843 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1844 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1845 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1847 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1848 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1850 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1852 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1853 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1854 reporting incorrect results.
1858 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1859 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1861 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1864 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1866 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1867 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1869 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1870 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1872 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1875 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1876 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1877 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1878 the file name does not look like a page range.
1880 printf has several changes:
1882 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1883 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1885 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1886 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1887 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1889 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1890 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1893 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1894 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1896 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1897 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1899 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1901 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1902 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1904 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1906 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1908 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1909 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1910 when first encountering the directory.
1914 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1915 output; POSIX requires this.
1917 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1918 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1920 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1922 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1923 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1925 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1926 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1928 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1929 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1930 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1931 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1932 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1933 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1934 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1936 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1937 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1938 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1940 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1941 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1943 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1945 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1947 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1948 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1949 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1950 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1952 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1956 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1957 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1958 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1959 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1960 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1962 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1963 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1964 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1966 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1967 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1969 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1970 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1972 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1973 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1974 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1975 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1976 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1978 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1979 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1981 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1982 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1984 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1986 nocreat do not create the output file
1987 excl fail if the output file already exists
1988 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1989 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1991 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1993 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1994 direct use direct I/O for data
1995 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1996 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1997 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1998 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1999 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2001 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2003 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2004 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2007 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2008 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2009 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2010 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2011 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2012 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2014 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2015 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2017 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2020 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2022 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2024 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2025 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2027 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2028 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2029 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2031 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2032 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2033 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2035 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2037 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2038 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2040 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2041 for compatibility with bash.
2043 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2045 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2046 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2047 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2048 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2050 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2051 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2053 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2054 ls supports TABSIZE.
2055 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2056 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2057 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2059 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2062 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2064 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2065 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2066 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2067 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2068 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2069 an offset, not as a file name.
2071 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2072 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2074 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2075 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2077 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2078 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2080 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2081 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2082 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2084 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2085 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2087 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2088 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2092 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2094 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2096 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2100 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2101 or more arguments between partitions.
2103 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2104 holes in the destination.
2106 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2107 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2108 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2109 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2110 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2111 terminates immediately.
2113 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2115 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2117 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2118 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2119 not the empty string.
2121 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2122 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2126 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2127 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2128 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2131 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2138 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2142 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2143 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2145 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2146 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2148 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2149 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2150 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2153 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2157 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2158 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2160 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2161 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2163 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2164 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2165 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2167 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2169 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2172 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2174 ** Configuration option
2176 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2177 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2181 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2182 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2186 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2187 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2188 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2191 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2192 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2193 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2194 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2195 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2196 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2197 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2200 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2204 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2205 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2206 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2208 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2209 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2211 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2213 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2214 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2215 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2216 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2218 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2220 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2221 not just the ones that reference directories
2223 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2224 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2226 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2227 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2228 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2230 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2231 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2232 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2233 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2234 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2235 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2237 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2242 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2243 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2245 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2247 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2249 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2251 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2252 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2254 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2255 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2257 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2259 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2263 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2265 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2267 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2268 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2269 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2270 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2271 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2273 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2274 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2276 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2277 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2279 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2280 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2282 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2283 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2284 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2288 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2289 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2290 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2291 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2292 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2293 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2294 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2295 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2296 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2297 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2298 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2299 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2300 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2301 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2303 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2305 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2306 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2308 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2310 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2312 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2313 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2315 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2317 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2318 without a trailing newline.
2320 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2321 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2323 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2326 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2330 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2332 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2334 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2335 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2336 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2337 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2339 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2341 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2342 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2343 be printed without leading spaces.
2345 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2346 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2351 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2352 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2353 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2355 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2357 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2358 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2360 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2361 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2363 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2364 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2366 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2368 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2370 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2372 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2373 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2375 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2377 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2379 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2380 byte offsets are specified.
2383 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2386 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2389 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2390 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2391 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2392 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2393 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2394 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2395 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2396 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2397 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2398 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2399 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2400 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2401 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2402 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2403 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2404 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2405 directory where M has write access.
2406 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2407 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2408 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2411 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2412 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2413 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2414 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2415 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2416 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2417 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2418 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2419 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2420 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2421 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2422 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2423 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2424 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2425 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2426 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2427 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2428 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2429 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2430 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2431 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2432 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2433 appeared one additional time.
2435 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2436 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2437 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2438 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2441 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2442 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2443 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2444 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2445 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2446 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2447 if there were more than 338.
2449 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2450 - false --help now exits nonzero
2453 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2454 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2455 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2456 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2459 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2460 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2461 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2462 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2463 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2466 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2467 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2468 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2469 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2470 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2471 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2472 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2475 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2476 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2477 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2478 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2479 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2480 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2482 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2483 under certain unusual conditions
2484 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2485 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2488 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2489 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2490 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2491 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2492 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2493 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2494 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2495 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2496 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2497 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2498 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2499 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2500 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2501 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2502 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2503 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2506 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2507 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2510 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2511 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2512 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2513 involving hard-linked directories
2514 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2515 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2516 character-special and block files
2519 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2520 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2521 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2522 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2523 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2524 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2525 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2526 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2527 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2529 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2530 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2531 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2532 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2533 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2534 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2535 specified on the command line.
2536 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2537 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2538 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2539 the first file untouched.
2540 * readlink: new program
2541 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2542 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2543 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2544 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2545 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2546 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2549 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2550 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2551 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2552 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2553 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2554 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2555 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2556 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2557 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2558 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2559 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2560 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2562 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2563 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2564 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2566 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2567 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2568 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2569 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2570 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2571 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2572 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2573 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2576 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2577 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2580 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2581 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2582 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2583 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2584 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2585 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2586 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2589 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2590 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2592 ========================================================================
2593 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2594 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2597 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2599 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2600 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2601 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2602 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2603 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2604 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2605 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2606 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2607 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2608 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2609 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2610 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2612 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2613 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2614 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2615 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2617 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2620 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2622 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2623 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2624 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2625 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2626 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2627 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2628 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2631 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2632 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2633 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2634 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2635 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2636 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2637 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2638 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2639 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2640 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2641 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2642 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2643 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2644 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2645 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2646 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2648 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2649 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2651 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2652 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2653 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2654 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2655 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2656 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2658 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2659 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2660 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2661 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2662 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2663 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2664 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2666 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2667 the source files in the following example:
2668 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2669 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2670 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2671 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2672 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2673 links between source files with --preserve=links
2674 * cp accepts new options:
2675 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2676 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2677 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2678 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2679 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2680 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2681 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2682 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2683 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2685 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2686 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2687 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2688 even though it's older than dest.
2689 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2690 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2691 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2692 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2693 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2695 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2696 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2697 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2698 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2699 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2700 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2701 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2703 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2704 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2705 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2707 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2708 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2709 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2710 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2711 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2712 This is the default.
2714 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2715 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2716 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2717 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2718 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2720 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2723 ========================================================================
2724 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2725 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2728 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2729 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2731 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2732 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2733 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2734 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2735 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2737 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2738 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2739 that specifies a non-directory
2742 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2743 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2744 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2745 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2746 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2747 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2748 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2749 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2750 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2751 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2752 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2753 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2754 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2755 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2756 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2757 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2758 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2759 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2760 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2761 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2762 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2763 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2764 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2765 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2767 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2768 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2769 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2771 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2773 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2774 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2776 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2777 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2778 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2779 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2780 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2782 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2783 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2784 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2785 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2786 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2788 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2790 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2791 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2792 * still more portability fixes
2793 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2794 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2796 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2798 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2800 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2802 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2803 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2804 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2805 there is any time remaining
2806 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2808 ========================================================================
2809 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2810 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2812 This package began as the union of the following:
2813 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2815 ========================================================================
2817 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2819 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2820 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2821 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2822 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2823 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2824 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.