1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
10 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
13 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
14 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
15 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
16 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
17 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
20 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
21 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
22 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
24 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
25 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
28 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
31 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
32 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
33 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
38 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
39 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
40 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
43 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
47 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
48 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
49 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
51 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
52 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
54 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
55 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
59 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
60 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
62 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
63 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
64 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
65 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
67 ** Changes in behavior
69 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
70 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
71 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
75 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
76 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
77 only .tar.xz files is enough.
80 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
84 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
85 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
86 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
88 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
89 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
91 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
92 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
93 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
94 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
95 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
97 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
98 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
99 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
100 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
101 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
102 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
103 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
104 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
106 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
107 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
109 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
110 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
112 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
115 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
116 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
117 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
119 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
120 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
121 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
124 ** Changes in behavior
126 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
127 when -v or -c specified.
129 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
130 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
134 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
135 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
136 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
137 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
138 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
140 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
141 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
142 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
144 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
145 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
146 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
147 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
148 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
149 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
150 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
152 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
153 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
154 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
158 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
159 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
161 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
164 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
165 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
167 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
168 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
170 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
171 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
173 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
175 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
179 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
180 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
182 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
185 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
189 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
190 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
192 ** Changes in behavior
194 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
195 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
196 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
197 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
198 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
199 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
201 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
202 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
203 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
207 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
210 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
214 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
215 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
218 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
219 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
222 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
223 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
226 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
229 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
232 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
233 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
235 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
240 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
241 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
242 processed portion thereof.
244 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
245 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
247 ** Changes in behavior
249 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
250 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
251 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
253 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
254 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
255 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
257 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
258 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
260 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
261 Use --preserve-context instead.
263 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
270 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
271 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
272 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
273 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
276 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
277 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
279 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
280 reject file names invalid for that file system.
282 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
287 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
288 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
289 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
290 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
291 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
292 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
293 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
294 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
296 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
297 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
298 the same number of fields are output for each line.
300 ** Changes in behavior
302 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
303 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
304 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
307 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
311 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
312 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
313 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
320 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
321 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
323 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
324 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
326 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
327 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
329 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
330 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
331 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
334 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
335 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
337 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
338 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
339 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
341 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
343 ** Changes in behavior
345 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
346 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
347 to the number of available processors.
351 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
354 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
358 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
359 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
360 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
361 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
363 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
364 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
365 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
367 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
368 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
370 ** Changes in behavior
372 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
373 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
375 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
376 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
377 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
378 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
379 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
380 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
382 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
383 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
384 the same way as the others.
387 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
391 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
392 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
393 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
395 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
396 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
398 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
399 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
400 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
402 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
405 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
408 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
409 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
410 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
412 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
413 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
414 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
415 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
419 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
420 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
422 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
425 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
426 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
428 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
430 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
431 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
432 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
434 ** Changes in behavior
436 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
437 rather than its aliased target.
439 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
440 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
441 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
443 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
444 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
445 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
446 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
447 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
448 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
449 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
450 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
452 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
454 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
456 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
457 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
460 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
461 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
462 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
463 control like taskset for example.
465 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
467 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
468 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
469 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
470 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
471 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
472 includes %C when context information is available.
474 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
475 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
476 rather than a file system attribute.
478 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
479 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
480 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
481 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
483 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
484 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
485 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
487 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
488 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
489 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
492 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
496 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
499 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
501 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
504 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
505 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
506 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
507 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
509 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
510 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
515 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
516 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
518 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
519 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
520 duration after the initial signal was sent.
522 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
523 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
524 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
525 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
526 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
527 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
528 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
529 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
530 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
532 ** Changes in behavior
534 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
535 sequence when it would be a no-op.
537 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
538 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
541 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
545 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
546 of available processors, which may not have been the case
547 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
552 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
553 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
555 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
556 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
557 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
558 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
560 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
561 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
562 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
569 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
570 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
573 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
574 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
575 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
577 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
580 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
581 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
582 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
585 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
586 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
589 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
590 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
591 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
594 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
595 renamed-aside and then recreated.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
598 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
599 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
600 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
603 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
604 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
605 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
607 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
608 processes will not intersperse their output.
609 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
612 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
616 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
619 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
620 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
622 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
623 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
624 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
625 the presence of the empty string argument.
626 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
628 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
629 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
630 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
631 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
633 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
636 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
637 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
638 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
640 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
641 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
642 and with a malicious user on the same system
643 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
647 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
651 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
652 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
655 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
656 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
657 offending directory and all "contents."
659 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
660 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
661 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
663 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
664 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
665 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
667 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
668 processes will not intersperse their output.
669 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
670 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
672 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
673 output the name of the file to stdout.
674 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
676 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
677 call fails with errno == EACCES.
678 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
680 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
681 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
684 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
685 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
686 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
688 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
689 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
690 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
691 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
692 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
693 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
695 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
696 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
697 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
698 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
700 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
701 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
703 ** Changes in behavior
705 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
706 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
707 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
708 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
709 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
711 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
712 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
713 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
714 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
716 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
718 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
719 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
720 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
721 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
722 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
726 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
730 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
731 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
733 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
734 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
736 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
737 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
738 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
740 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
741 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
744 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
748 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
749 when the source file doesn't have write access.
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
752 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
753 to accommodate leap seconds.
754 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
756 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
757 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
758 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
760 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
762 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
763 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
764 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
766 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
767 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
768 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
769 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
770 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
774 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
775 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
776 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
777 directory or a symlink to a directory.
779 ** Changes in behavior
781 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
782 environment variable is set.
784 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
785 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
786 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
790 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
791 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
792 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
793 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
795 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
796 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
797 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
798 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
802 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
803 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
804 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
806 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
807 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
808 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
809 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
810 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
811 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
814 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
815 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
818 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
822 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
823 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
824 and libraries tested at configure time.
825 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
827 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
830 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
833 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
834 printing a summary to stderr.
835 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
837 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
838 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
839 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
841 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
842 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
844 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
845 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
846 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
847 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
849 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
850 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
851 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
852 which is relatively unusual.
853 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
855 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
856 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
857 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
858 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
859 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
860 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
861 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
865 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
866 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
867 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
868 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
869 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
873 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
874 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
876 ** Changes in behavior
878 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
879 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
880 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
881 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
882 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
885 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
889 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
890 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
892 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
893 before data copying has started.
895 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
896 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
898 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
899 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
900 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
901 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
903 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
904 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
905 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
906 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
908 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
913 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
914 for its standard streams.
916 ** Changes in behavior
918 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
919 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
920 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
921 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
922 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
923 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
925 ** Deprecated options
927 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
928 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
932 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
934 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
935 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
938 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
940 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
941 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
943 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
944 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
947 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
951 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
952 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
953 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
954 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
956 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
957 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
958 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
959 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
960 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
965 make check: two tests have been corrected
969 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
970 inherited from gnulib.
973 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
977 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
978 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
979 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
980 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
982 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
983 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
985 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
987 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
988 systems without xattr support.
990 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
991 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
992 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
994 ** Changes in behavior
996 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
997 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
998 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
999 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1001 ** Improved robustness
1003 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1004 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1005 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1006 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1007 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1008 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1009 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1010 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1011 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1015 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1016 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1018 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1019 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1020 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1021 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1022 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1025 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1029 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1030 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1031 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1035 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1036 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1037 data was read, or on process exit.
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1040 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1041 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1042 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1045 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1046 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1047 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1050 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1051 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1053 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1054 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1056 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1057 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1058 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1060 ** Changes in behavior
1062 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1063 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1064 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1066 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1067 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1069 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1070 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1071 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1074 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1078 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1080 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1081 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1082 install: Never copies xattrs
1084 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1085 from overwriting any existing destination file
1087 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1088 mode where this feature is available.
1090 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1091 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1092 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1093 do not modify the destination at all.
1095 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1097 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1101 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1104 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1106 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1107 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1109 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1110 processing the first file name
1112 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1113 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1114 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1115 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1117 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1118 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1120 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1121 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1124 ** Changes in behavior
1126 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1127 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1129 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1130 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1131 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1133 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1134 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1136 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1138 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1139 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1140 is still marked with a '+'.
1143 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1147 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1148 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1152 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1153 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1154 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1155 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1156 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1157 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1159 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1160 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1162 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1163 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1165 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1167 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1168 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1169 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1171 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1172 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1174 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1175 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1176 used to factor large numbers.
1178 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1181 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1183 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1185 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1186 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1188 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1189 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1190 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1191 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1193 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1194 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1195 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1197 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1198 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1202 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1204 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1205 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1207 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1208 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1210 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1212 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1213 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1217 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1218 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1219 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1221 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1223 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1224 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1225 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1227 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1228 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1229 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1231 ** Changes in behavior
1233 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1234 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1237 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1241 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1242 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1243 'futimens' system calls.
1247 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1249 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1250 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1251 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1253 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1254 with no USERNAME argument.
1256 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1257 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1258 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1260 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1261 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1262 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1263 number of fields for some inputs.
1265 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1266 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1268 ** Changes in behavior
1270 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1271 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1274 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1278 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1280 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1281 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1282 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1283 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1285 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1286 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1288 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1289 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1291 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1292 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1294 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1295 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1296 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1297 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1299 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1300 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1301 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1302 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1303 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1304 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1306 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1307 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1309 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1310 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1311 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1313 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1314 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1316 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1317 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1319 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1320 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1321 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1322 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1324 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1325 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1327 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1328 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1330 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1331 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1336 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1337 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1339 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1340 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1341 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1342 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1346 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1347 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1349 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1351 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1355 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1356 which have negative errno values.
1360 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1364 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1368 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1372 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1376 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1377 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1378 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1380 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1381 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1382 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1387 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1388 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1389 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1390 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1393 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1397 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1399 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1400 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1401 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1404 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1408 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1409 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1411 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1413 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1415 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1417 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1421 ** Changes in behavior
1423 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1424 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1426 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1427 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1429 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1430 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1431 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1435 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1436 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1437 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1438 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1439 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1440 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1441 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1442 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1443 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1444 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1445 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1447 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1448 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1449 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1452 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1455 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1456 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1457 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1459 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1460 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1461 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1464 ** New build options
1466 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1467 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1468 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1469 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1471 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1472 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1473 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1474 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1475 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1476 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1477 of "make check" fail.
1479 ** Remove deprecated options
1481 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1482 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1483 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1484 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1485 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1487 ** Improved robustness
1489 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1490 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1491 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1492 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1493 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1494 loss of the contents of a/f.
1496 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1497 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1501 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1502 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1503 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1505 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1506 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1507 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1508 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1510 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1511 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1512 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1513 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1514 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1515 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1516 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1517 destination is a symlink.
1519 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1521 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1522 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1524 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1525 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1527 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1529 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1530 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1532 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1533 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1535 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1538 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1539 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1541 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1542 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1544 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1545 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1546 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1547 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1549 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1550 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1551 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1553 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1554 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1555 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1557 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1558 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1559 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1560 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1562 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1563 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1564 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1566 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1567 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1569 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1570 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1572 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1574 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1575 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1576 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1578 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1579 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1581 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1582 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1584 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1585 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1587 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1588 [present in the original version]
1591 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1595 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1597 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1598 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1599 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1601 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1602 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1604 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1608 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1609 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1611 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1612 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1614 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1615 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1617 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1618 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1619 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1620 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1621 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1622 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1624 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1625 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1628 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1629 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1631 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1634 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1635 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1636 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1638 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1639 directory is unreadable.
1641 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1642 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1643 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1645 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1646 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1647 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1648 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1649 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1652 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1653 Before it would print nothing.
1655 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1657 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1658 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1659 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1660 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1661 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1662 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1663 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1664 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1666 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1670 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1671 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1672 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1674 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1675 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1676 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1677 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1680 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1684 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1685 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1686 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1687 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1688 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1689 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1690 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1692 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1693 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1694 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1695 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1696 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1697 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1698 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1699 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1701 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1702 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1703 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1706 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1710 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1711 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1713 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1714 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1715 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1717 ** Improved robustness
1719 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1720 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1721 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1724 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1728 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1729 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1730 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1731 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1732 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1734 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1738 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1741 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1745 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1746 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1747 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1748 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1750 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1751 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1753 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1754 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1755 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1758 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1760 ** Improved robustness
1762 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1763 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1765 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1766 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1767 or NFS-mounted partition.
1769 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1770 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1774 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1775 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1776 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1777 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1778 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1779 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1781 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1782 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1784 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1785 or neglect to report file removal.
1787 For the "groups" command:
1789 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1790 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1792 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1794 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1796 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1800 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1801 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1804 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1806 ** Changes in behavior
1808 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1809 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1810 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1811 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1813 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1814 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1815 a final `./' or `../' component.
1817 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1818 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1819 this only for pipes.
1821 ** Infrastructure changes
1823 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1824 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1825 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1826 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1830 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1831 name is "." or "..".
1833 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1834 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1835 dirent.d_type support.
1837 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1838 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1840 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1841 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1842 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1843 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1846 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1848 ** Changes in behavior
1850 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1854 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1855 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1859 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1860 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1861 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1863 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1864 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1866 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1867 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1869 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1871 ** Improved robustness
1873 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1874 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1875 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1877 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1878 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1881 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1882 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1884 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1885 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1887 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1888 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1890 ** Changes in behavior
1892 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1893 where the two are distinct.
1895 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1896 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1897 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1898 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1899 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1900 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1901 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1902 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1903 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1904 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1905 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1906 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1907 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1908 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1909 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1910 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1911 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1913 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1914 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1915 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1917 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1918 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1919 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1920 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1923 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1924 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1928 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1929 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1930 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1931 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1933 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1934 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1935 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1937 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1938 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1939 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1940 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1941 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1944 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1945 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1947 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1948 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1949 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1950 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1952 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1953 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1954 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1956 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1957 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1958 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1959 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1961 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1962 and sticky) with the -m option.
1964 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1965 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1966 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1967 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1968 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1970 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1971 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1973 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1977 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1978 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1979 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1980 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1982 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1984 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1986 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1987 silently ignoring one of them.
1989 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1990 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1991 containing this change was 5.92.
1993 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1994 automatically newline terminated.
1996 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1997 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1998 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1999 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2002 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2003 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2004 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2007 ** Scheduled for removal
2009 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2010 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2012 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2013 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2014 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2015 command to unlink a directory.
2017 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2018 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2019 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2020 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2024 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2025 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2026 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2027 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2028 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2029 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2033 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2034 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2036 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2038 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2039 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2040 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2042 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2043 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2046 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2047 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2049 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2050 list directories before files.
2052 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2053 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2054 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2055 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2058 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2060 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2062 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2063 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2064 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2066 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2067 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2071 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2072 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2073 usually printing nothing.
2075 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2077 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2078 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2079 them with hard-linked directories.
2081 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2082 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2083 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2085 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2086 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2087 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2089 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2092 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2093 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2095 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2096 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2098 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2099 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2101 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2102 all command-line arguments.
2104 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2106 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2108 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2109 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2111 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2113 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2114 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2115 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2116 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2117 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2119 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2120 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2122 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2123 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2124 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2125 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2127 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2129 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2133 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2134 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2136 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2137 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2139 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2140 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2142 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2143 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2145 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2146 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2148 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2150 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2151 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2152 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2155 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2157 ** Build-related bug fixes
2159 installing .mo files would fail
2162 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2166 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2168 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2171 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2175 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2176 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2180 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2182 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2183 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2185 ** Deprecated options
2187 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2188 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2190 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2194 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2196 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2197 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2198 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2199 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2201 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2204 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2210 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2215 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2217 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2219 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2220 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2221 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2223 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2224 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2225 problematic usages. These include:
2227 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2228 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2229 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2230 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2231 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2232 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2233 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2234 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2235 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2237 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2238 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2240 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2241 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2242 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2243 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2245 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2246 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2247 between binary and text files.
2249 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2253 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2257 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2258 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2260 head tac tail tee tr
2261 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2263 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2264 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2266 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2267 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2268 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2270 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2272 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2274 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2275 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2276 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2280 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2282 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2283 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2285 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2286 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2287 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2291 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2292 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2296 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2297 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2298 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2302 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2303 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2307 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2309 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2311 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2315 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2316 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2317 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2319 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2320 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2321 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2322 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2323 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2325 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2329 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2330 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2331 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2333 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2335 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2336 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2337 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2338 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2340 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2342 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2343 rather than silently wrapping around.
2345 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2346 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2348 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2349 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2351 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2352 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2353 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2354 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2356 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2358 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2360 ** Improved robustness
2362 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2363 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2364 no matter how large the result.
2366 ** Improved portability
2368 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2369 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2371 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2373 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2374 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2375 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2377 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2378 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2382 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2383 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2385 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2387 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2388 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2389 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2390 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2392 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2393 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2395 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2396 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2397 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2399 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2401 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2402 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2404 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2405 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2407 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2409 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2410 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2412 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2413 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2415 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2416 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2417 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2419 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2421 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2423 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2427 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2429 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2430 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2431 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2433 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2434 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2436 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2437 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2438 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2440 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2441 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2443 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2444 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2445 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2446 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2448 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2449 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2451 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2452 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2453 the file system does not support it.
2455 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2457 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2458 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2460 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2462 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2463 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2465 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2466 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2467 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2468 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2470 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2471 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2474 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2475 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2476 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2477 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2479 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2480 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2481 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2482 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2484 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2485 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2487 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2489 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2490 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2491 reporting incorrect results.
2495 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2496 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2498 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2501 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2503 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2504 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2506 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2507 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2509 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2512 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2513 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2514 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2515 the file name does not look like a page range.
2517 printf has several changes:
2519 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2520 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2522 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2523 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2524 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2526 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2527 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2530 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2531 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2533 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2534 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2536 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2538 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2539 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2541 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2543 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2545 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2546 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2547 when first encountering the directory.
2551 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2552 output; POSIX requires this.
2554 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2555 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2557 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2559 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2560 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2562 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2563 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2565 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2566 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2567 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2568 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2569 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2570 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2571 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2573 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2574 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2575 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2577 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2578 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2580 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2582 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2584 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2585 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2586 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2587 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2589 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2593 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2594 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2595 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2596 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2597 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2599 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2600 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2601 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2603 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2604 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2606 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2607 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2609 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2610 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2611 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2612 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2613 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2615 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2616 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2618 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2619 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2621 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2623 nocreat do not create the output file
2624 excl fail if the output file already exists
2625 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2626 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2628 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2630 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2631 direct use direct I/O for data
2632 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2633 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2634 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2635 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2636 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2638 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2640 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2641 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2644 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2645 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2646 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2647 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2648 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2649 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2651 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2652 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2654 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2657 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2659 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2661 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2662 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2664 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2665 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2666 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2668 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2669 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2670 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2672 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2674 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2675 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2677 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2678 for compatibility with bash.
2680 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2682 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2683 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2684 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2685 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2687 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2688 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2690 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2691 ls supports TABSIZE.
2692 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2693 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2694 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2696 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2699 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2701 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2702 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2703 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2704 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2705 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2706 an offset, not as a file name.
2708 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2709 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2711 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2712 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2714 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2715 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2717 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2718 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2719 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2721 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2722 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2724 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2725 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2729 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2731 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2733 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2737 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2738 or more arguments between partitions.
2740 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2741 holes in the destination.
2743 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2744 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2745 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2746 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2747 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2748 terminates immediately.
2750 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2752 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2754 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2755 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2756 not the empty string.
2758 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2759 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2763 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2764 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2765 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2768 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2775 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2779 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2780 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2782 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2783 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2785 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2786 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2787 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2790 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2794 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2795 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2797 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2798 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2800 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2801 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2802 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2804 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2806 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2809 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2811 ** Configuration option
2813 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2814 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2818 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2819 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2823 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2824 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2825 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2828 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2829 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2830 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2831 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2832 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2833 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2834 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2837 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2841 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2842 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2843 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2845 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2846 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2848 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2850 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2851 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2852 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2853 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2855 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2857 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2858 not just the ones that reference directories
2860 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2861 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2863 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2864 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2865 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2867 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2868 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2869 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2870 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2871 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2872 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2874 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2879 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2880 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2882 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2884 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2886 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2888 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2889 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2891 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2892 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2894 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2896 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2900 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2902 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2904 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2905 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2906 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2907 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2908 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2910 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2911 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2913 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2914 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2916 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2917 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2919 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2920 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2921 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2925 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2926 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2927 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2928 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2929 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2930 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2931 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2932 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2933 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2934 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2935 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2936 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2937 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2938 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2940 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2942 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2943 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2945 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2947 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2949 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2950 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2952 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2954 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2955 without a trailing newline.
2957 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2958 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2960 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2963 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2967 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2969 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2971 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2972 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2973 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2974 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2976 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2978 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2979 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2980 be printed without leading spaces.
2982 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2983 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2988 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2989 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2990 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2992 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2994 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2995 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2997 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2998 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3000 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3001 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3003 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3005 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3007 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3009 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
3010 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3012 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3014 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3016 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3017 byte offsets are specified.
3020 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3023 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
3026 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3027 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3028 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3029 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3030 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3031 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3032 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3033 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3034 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3035 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3036 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3037 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3038 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3039 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3040 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3041 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3042 directory where M has write access.
3043 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3044 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3045 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3048 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3049 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3050 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3051 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3052 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3053 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3054 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3055 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3056 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3057 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3058 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3059 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3060 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3061 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3062 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3063 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3064 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3065 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3066 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3067 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3068 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3069 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3070 appeared one additional time.
3072 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3073 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3074 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3075 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3078 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3079 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3080 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3081 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3082 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3083 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3084 if there were more than 338.
3086 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3087 - false --help now exits nonzero
3090 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3091 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3092 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3093 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3096 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3097 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3098 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3099 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3100 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3103 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3104 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3105 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3106 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3107 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3108 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3109 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3112 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3113 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3114 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3115 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3116 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3117 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3119 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3120 under certain unusual conditions
3121 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3122 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3125 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3126 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3127 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3128 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3129 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3130 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3131 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3132 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3133 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3134 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3135 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3136 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3137 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3138 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3139 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3140 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3143 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3144 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3147 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3148 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3149 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3150 involving hard-linked directories
3151 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3152 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3153 character-special and block files
3156 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3157 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3158 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3159 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3160 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3161 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3162 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3163 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3164 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3166 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3167 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3168 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3169 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3170 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3171 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3172 specified on the command line.
3173 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3174 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3175 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3176 the first file untouched.
3177 * readlink: new program
3178 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3179 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3180 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3181 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3182 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3183 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3186 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3187 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3188 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3189 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3190 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3191 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3192 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3193 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3194 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3195 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3196 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3197 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3199 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3200 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3201 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3203 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3204 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3205 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3206 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3207 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3208 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3209 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3210 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3213 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3214 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3217 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3218 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3219 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3220 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3221 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3222 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3223 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3226 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3227 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3229 ========================================================================
3230 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3231 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3234 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3236 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3237 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3238 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3239 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3240 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3241 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3242 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3243 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3244 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3245 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3246 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3247 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3249 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3250 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3251 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3252 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3254 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3257 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3259 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3260 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3261 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3262 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3263 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3264 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3265 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3268 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3269 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3270 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3271 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3272 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3273 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3274 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3275 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3276 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3277 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3278 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3279 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3280 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3281 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3282 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3283 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3285 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3286 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3288 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3289 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3290 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3291 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3292 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3293 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3295 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3296 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3297 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3298 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3299 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3300 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3301 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3303 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3304 the source files in the following example:
3305 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3306 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3307 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3308 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3309 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3310 links between source files with --preserve=links
3311 * cp accepts new options:
3312 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3313 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3314 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3315 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3316 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3317 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3318 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3319 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3320 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3322 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3323 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3324 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3325 even though it's older than dest.
3326 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3327 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3328 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3329 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3330 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3332 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3333 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3334 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3335 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3336 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3337 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3338 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3340 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3341 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3342 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3344 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3345 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3346 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3347 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3348 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3349 This is the default.
3351 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3352 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3353 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3354 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3355 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3357 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3360 ========================================================================
3361 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3362 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3365 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3366 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3368 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3369 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3370 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3371 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3372 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3374 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3375 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3376 that specifies a non-directory
3379 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3380 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3381 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3382 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3383 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3384 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3385 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3386 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3387 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3388 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3389 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3390 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3391 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3392 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3393 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3394 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3395 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3396 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3397 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3398 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3399 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3400 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3401 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3402 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3404 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3405 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3406 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3408 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3410 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3411 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3413 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3414 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3415 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3416 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3417 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3419 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3420 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3421 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3422 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3423 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3425 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3427 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3428 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3429 * still more portability fixes
3430 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3431 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3433 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3435 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3437 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3439 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3440 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3441 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3442 there is any time remaining
3443 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3445 ========================================================================
3446 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3447 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3449 This package began as the union of the following:
3450 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3452 ========================================================================
3454 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3456 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3457 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3458 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3459 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3460 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3461 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.