1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
8 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
11 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
12 processes will not intersperse their output.
13 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
14 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
16 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
17 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
18 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
20 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
21 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
22 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
23 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
24 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
25 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
27 ** Changes in behavior
29 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
30 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
31 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
32 with the invoked command failing with status 1.
36 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
37 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
39 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
40 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
43 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
47 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
48 when the source file doesn't have write access.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
51 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
52 to accommodate leap seconds.
53 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
55 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
56 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
59 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
61 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
62 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
63 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
65 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
66 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
67 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
68 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
69 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
73 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
74 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
75 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
76 directory or a symlink to a directory.
78 ** Changes in behavior
80 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
81 environment variable is set.
83 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
84 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
85 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
89 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
90 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
91 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
92 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
94 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
95 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
96 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
97 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
101 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
102 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
103 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
105 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
106 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
107 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
108 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
109 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
110 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
113 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
114 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
117 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
121 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
122 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
123 and libraries tested at configure time.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
126 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
129 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
130 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
132 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
133 printing a summary to stderr.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
136 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
137 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
138 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
140 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
143 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
144 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
145 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
146 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
148 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
149 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
150 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
151 which is relatively unusual.
152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
154 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
155 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
156 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
157 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
158 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
159 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
160 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
164 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
165 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
166 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
167 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
168 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
172 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
173 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
175 ** Changes in behavior
177 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
178 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
179 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
180 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
181 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
184 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
188 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
189 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
191 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
192 before data copying has started.
194 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
195 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
197 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
198 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
199 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
200 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
202 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
203 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
204 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
205 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
207 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
212 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
213 for its standard streams.
215 ** Changes in behavior
217 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
218 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
219 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
220 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
221 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
222 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
224 ** Deprecated options
226 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
227 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
231 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
233 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
234 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
237 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
239 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
240 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
242 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
243 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
246 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
250 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
251 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
252 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
253 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
255 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
256 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
257 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
258 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
259 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
264 make check: two tests have been corrected
268 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
269 inherited from gnulib.
272 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
276 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
277 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
278 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
279 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
281 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
282 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
284 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
286 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
287 systems without xattr support.
289 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
290 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
291 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
293 ** Changes in behavior
295 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
296 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
297 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
298 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
300 ** Improved robustness
302 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
303 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
304 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
305 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
306 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
307 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
308 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
309 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
310 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
314 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
315 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
317 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
318 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
319 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
320 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
321 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
324 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
328 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
329 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
330 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
334 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
335 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
336 data was read, or on process exit.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
339 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
340 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
341 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
344 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
345 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
346 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
349 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
350 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
352 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
353 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
355 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
356 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
357 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
359 ** Changes in behavior
361 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
362 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
363 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
365 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
366 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
368 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
369 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
370 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
373 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
377 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
379 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
380 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
381 install: Never copies xattrs
383 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
384 from overwriting any existing destination file
386 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
387 mode where this feature is available.
389 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
390 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
391 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
392 do not modify the destination at all.
394 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
396 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
400 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
403 cp uses much less memory in some situations
405 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
406 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
408 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
409 processing the first file name
411 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
412 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
413 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
414 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
416 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
417 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
419 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
420 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
423 ** Changes in behavior
425 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
426 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
428 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
429 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
430 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
432 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
433 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
435 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
437 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
438 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
439 is still marked with a '+'.
442 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
446 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
447 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
451 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
452 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
453 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
454 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
455 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
456 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
458 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
459 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
461 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
462 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
464 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
466 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
467 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
468 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
470 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
471 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
473 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
474 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
475 used to factor large numbers.
477 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
480 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
482 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
484 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
485 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
487 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
488 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
489 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
490 maximum command-line (argv) length.
492 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
493 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
494 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
496 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
497 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
501 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
503 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
504 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
506 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
507 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
509 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
511 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
512 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
516 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
517 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
518 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
520 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
522 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
523 no matter how many files are in a given directory
525 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
526 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
527 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
529 ** Changes in behavior
531 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
532 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
535 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
539 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
541 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
542 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
543 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
545 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
546 with no USERNAME argument.
548 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
549 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
550 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
552 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
553 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
554 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
555 number of fields for some inputs.
557 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
558 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
560 ** Changes in behavior
562 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
563 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
566 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
570 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
572 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
573 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
574 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
575 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
577 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
578 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
580 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
581 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
583 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
584 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
586 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
587 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
588 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
589 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
591 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
592 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
593 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
594 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
595 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
596 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
598 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
599 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
601 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
602 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
605 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
606 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
608 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
609 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
611 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
612 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
613 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
614 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
616 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
617 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
619 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
620 in more cases when a directory is empty.
622 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
623 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
628 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
629 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
631 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
632 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
633 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
634 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
638 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
639 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
641 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
643 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
647 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
648 which have negative errno values.
652 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
656 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
660 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
664 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
668 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
669 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
672 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
673 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
674 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
679 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
680 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
681 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
682 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
685 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
689 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
691 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
692 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
693 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
696 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
700 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
701 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
703 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
705 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
707 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
709 ** Programs no longer installed by default
713 ** Changes in behavior
715 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
716 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
718 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
719 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
721 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
722 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
723 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
727 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
728 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
729 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
730 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
731 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
732 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
733 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
734 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
735 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
736 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
737 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
739 The following commands and options now support the standard size
740 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
741 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
744 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
747 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
748 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
749 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
751 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
752 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
753 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
758 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
759 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
760 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
761 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
763 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
764 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
765 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
766 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
767 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
768 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
769 of "make check" fail.
771 ** Remove deprecated options
773 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
774 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
775 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
776 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
777 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
779 ** Improved robustness
781 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
782 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
783 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
784 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
785 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
786 loss of the contents of a/f.
788 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
789 in its 35-colon command-line argument
793 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
794 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
795 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
797 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
798 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
799 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
800 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
802 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
803 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
804 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
805 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
806 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
807 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
808 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
809 destination is a symlink.
811 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
813 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
814 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
816 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
817 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
819 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
821 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
822 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
824 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
825 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
827 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
830 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
831 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
833 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
834 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
836 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
837 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
838 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
839 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
841 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
842 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
843 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
845 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
846 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
847 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
849 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
850 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
851 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
852 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
854 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
855 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
856 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
858 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
859 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
861 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
862 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
864 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
866 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
867 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
868 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
870 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
871 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
873 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
874 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
876 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
877 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
879 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
880 [present in the original version]
883 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
887 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
889 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
890 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
891 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
893 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
894 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
896 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
900 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
901 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
903 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
904 support but with insufficient /proc support.
906 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
907 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
909 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
910 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
911 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
912 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
913 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
914 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
916 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
917 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
920 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
921 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
923 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
926 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
927 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
928 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
930 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
931 directory is unreadable.
933 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
934 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
935 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
937 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
938 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
939 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
940 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
941 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
944 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
945 Before it would print nothing.
947 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
949 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
950 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
951 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
952 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
953 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
954 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
955 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
956 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
958 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
962 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
963 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
964 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
966 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
967 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
968 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
969 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
972 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
976 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
977 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
978 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
979 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
980 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
981 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
982 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
984 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
985 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
986 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
987 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
988 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
989 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
990 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
991 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
993 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
994 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
995 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
998 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1002 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1003 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1005 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1006 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1007 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1009 ** Improved robustness
1011 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1012 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1013 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1016 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1020 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1021 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1022 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1023 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1024 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1026 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1030 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1033 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1037 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1038 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1039 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1040 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1042 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1043 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1045 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1046 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1047 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1050 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1052 ** Improved robustness
1054 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1055 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1057 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1058 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1059 or NFS-mounted partition.
1061 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1062 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1066 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1067 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1068 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1069 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1070 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1071 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1073 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1074 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1076 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1077 or neglect to report file removal.
1079 For the "groups" command:
1081 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1082 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1084 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1086 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1088 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1092 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1093 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1096 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1098 ** Changes in behavior
1100 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1101 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1102 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1103 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1105 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1106 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1107 a final `./' or `../' component.
1109 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1110 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1111 this only for pipes.
1113 ** Infrastructure changes
1115 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1116 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1117 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1118 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1122 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1123 name is "." or "..".
1125 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1126 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1127 dirent.d_type support.
1129 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1130 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1132 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1133 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1134 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1135 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1138 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1140 ** Changes in behavior
1142 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1146 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1147 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1151 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1152 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1153 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1155 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1156 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1158 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1159 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1161 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1163 ** Improved robustness
1165 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1166 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1167 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1169 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1170 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1173 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1174 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1176 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1177 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1179 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1180 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1182 ** Changes in behavior
1184 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1185 where the two are distinct.
1187 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1188 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1189 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1190 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1191 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1192 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1193 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1194 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1195 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1196 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1197 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1198 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1199 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1200 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1201 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1202 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1203 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1205 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1206 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1207 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1209 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1210 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1211 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1212 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1215 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1216 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1220 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1221 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1222 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1223 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1225 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1226 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1227 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1229 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1230 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1231 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1232 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1233 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1236 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1237 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1239 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1240 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1241 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1242 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1244 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1245 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1246 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1248 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1249 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1250 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1251 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1253 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1254 and sticky) with the -m option.
1256 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1257 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1258 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1259 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1260 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1262 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1263 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1265 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1269 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1270 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1271 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1272 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1274 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1276 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1278 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1279 silently ignoring one of them.
1281 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1282 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1283 containing this change was 5.92.
1285 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1286 automatically newline terminated.
1288 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1289 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1290 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1291 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1294 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1295 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1296 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1299 ** Scheduled for removal
1301 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1302 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1304 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1305 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1306 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1307 command to unlink a directory.
1309 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1310 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1311 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1312 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1316 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1317 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1318 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1319 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1320 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1321 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1325 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1326 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1328 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1330 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1331 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1332 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1334 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1335 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1338 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1339 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1341 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1342 list directories before files.
1344 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1345 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1346 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1347 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1350 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1352 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1354 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1355 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1356 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1358 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1359 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1363 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1364 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1365 usually printing nothing.
1367 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1369 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1370 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1371 them with hard-linked directories.
1373 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1374 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1375 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1377 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1378 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1379 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1381 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1384 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1385 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1387 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1388 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1390 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1391 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1393 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1394 all command-line arguments.
1396 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1398 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1400 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1401 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1403 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1405 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1406 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1407 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1408 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1409 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1411 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1412 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1414 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1415 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1416 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1417 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1419 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1421 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1425 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1426 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1428 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1429 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1431 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1432 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1434 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1435 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1437 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1438 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1440 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1442 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1443 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1444 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1447 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1449 ** Build-related bug fixes
1451 installing .mo files would fail
1454 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1458 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1460 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1463 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1467 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1468 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1472 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1474 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1475 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1477 ** Deprecated options
1479 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1480 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1482 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1486 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1488 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1489 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1490 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1491 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1493 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1496 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1502 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1507 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1509 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1511 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1512 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1513 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1515 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1516 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1517 problematic usages. These include:
1519 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1520 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1521 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1522 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1523 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1524 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1525 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1526 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1527 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1529 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1530 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1532 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1533 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1534 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1535 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1537 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1538 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1539 between binary and text files.
1541 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1545 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1549 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1550 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1552 head tac tail tee tr
1553 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1555 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1556 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1558 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1559 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1560 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1562 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1564 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1566 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1567 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1568 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1572 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1574 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1575 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1577 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1578 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1579 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1583 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1584 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1588 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1589 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1590 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1594 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1595 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1599 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1601 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1603 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1607 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1608 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1609 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1611 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1612 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1613 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1614 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1615 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1617 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1621 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1622 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1623 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1625 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1627 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1628 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1629 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1630 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1632 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1634 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1635 rather than silently wrapping around.
1637 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1638 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1640 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1641 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1643 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1644 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1645 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1646 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1648 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1650 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1652 ** Improved robustness
1654 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1655 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1656 no matter how large the result.
1658 ** Improved portability
1660 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1661 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1663 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1665 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1666 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1667 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1669 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1670 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1674 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1675 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1677 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1679 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1680 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1681 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1682 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1684 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1685 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1687 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1688 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1689 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1691 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1693 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1694 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1696 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1697 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1699 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1701 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1702 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1704 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1705 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1707 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1708 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1709 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1711 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1713 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1715 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1719 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1721 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1722 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1723 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1725 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1726 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1728 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1729 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1730 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1732 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1733 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1735 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1736 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1737 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1738 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1740 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1741 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1743 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1744 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1745 the file system does not support it.
1747 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1749 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1750 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1752 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1754 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1755 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1757 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1758 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1759 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1760 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1762 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1763 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1766 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1767 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1768 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1769 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1771 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1772 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1773 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1774 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1776 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1777 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1779 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1781 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1782 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1783 reporting incorrect results.
1787 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1788 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1790 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1793 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1795 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1796 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1798 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1799 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1801 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1804 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1805 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1806 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1807 the file name does not look like a page range.
1809 printf has several changes:
1811 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1812 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1814 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1815 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1816 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1818 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1819 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1822 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1823 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1825 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1826 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1828 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1830 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1831 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1833 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1835 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1837 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1838 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1839 when first encountering the directory.
1843 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1844 output; POSIX requires this.
1846 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1847 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1849 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1851 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1852 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1854 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1855 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1857 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1858 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1859 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1860 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1861 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1862 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1863 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1865 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1866 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1867 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1869 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1870 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1872 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1874 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1876 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1877 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1878 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1879 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1881 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1885 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1886 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1887 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1888 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1889 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1891 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1892 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1893 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1895 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1896 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1898 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1899 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1901 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1902 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1903 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1904 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1905 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1907 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1908 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1910 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1911 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1913 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1915 nocreat do not create the output file
1916 excl fail if the output file already exists
1917 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1918 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1920 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1922 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1923 direct use direct I/O for data
1924 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1925 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1926 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1927 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1928 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1930 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1932 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1933 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1936 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1937 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1938 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1939 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1940 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1941 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1943 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1944 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1946 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1949 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1951 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1953 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1954 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1956 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1957 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1958 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1960 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1961 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1962 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1964 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1966 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1967 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1969 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1970 for compatibility with bash.
1972 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1974 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1975 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1976 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1977 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1979 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1980 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1982 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1983 ls supports TABSIZE.
1984 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1985 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1986 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1988 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1991 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1993 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1994 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1995 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1996 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1997 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1998 an offset, not as a file name.
2000 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2001 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2003 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2004 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2006 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2007 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2009 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2010 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2011 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2013 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2014 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2016 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2017 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2021 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2023 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2025 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2029 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2030 or more arguments between partitions.
2032 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2033 holes in the destination.
2035 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2036 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2037 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2038 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2039 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2040 terminates immediately.
2042 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2044 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2046 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2047 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2048 not the empty string.
2050 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2051 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2055 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2056 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2057 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2060 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2067 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2071 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2072 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2074 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2075 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2077 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2078 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2079 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2082 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2086 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2087 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2089 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2090 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2092 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2093 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2094 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2096 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2098 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2101 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2103 ** Configuration option
2105 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2106 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2110 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2111 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2115 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2116 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2117 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2120 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2121 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2122 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2123 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2124 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2125 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2126 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2129 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2133 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2134 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2135 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2137 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2138 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2140 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2142 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2143 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2144 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2145 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2147 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2149 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2150 not just the ones that reference directories
2152 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2153 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2155 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2156 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2157 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2159 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2160 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2161 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2162 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2163 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2164 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2166 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2171 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2172 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2174 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2176 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2178 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2180 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2181 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2183 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2184 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2186 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2188 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2192 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2194 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2196 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2197 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2198 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2199 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2200 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2202 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2203 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2205 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2206 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2208 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2209 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2211 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2212 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2213 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2217 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2218 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2219 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2220 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2221 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2222 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2223 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2224 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2225 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2226 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2227 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2228 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2229 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2230 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2232 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2234 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2235 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2237 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2239 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2241 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2242 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2244 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2246 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2247 without a trailing newline.
2249 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2250 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2252 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2255 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2259 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2261 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2263 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2264 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2265 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2266 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2268 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2270 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2271 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2272 be printed without leading spaces.
2274 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2275 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2280 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2281 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2282 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2284 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2286 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2287 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2289 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2290 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2292 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2293 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2295 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2297 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2299 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2301 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2302 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2304 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2306 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2308 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2309 byte offsets are specified.
2312 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2315 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2318 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2319 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2320 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2321 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2322 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2323 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2324 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2325 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2326 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2327 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2328 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2329 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2330 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2331 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2332 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2333 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2334 directory where M has write access.
2335 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2336 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2337 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2340 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2341 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2342 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2343 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2344 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2345 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2346 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2347 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2348 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2349 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2350 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2351 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2352 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2353 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2354 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2355 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2356 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2357 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2358 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2359 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2360 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2361 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2362 appeared one additional time.
2364 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2365 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2366 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2367 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2370 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2371 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2372 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2373 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2374 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2375 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2376 if there were more than 338.
2378 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2379 - false --help now exits nonzero
2382 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2383 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2384 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2385 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2388 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2389 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2390 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2391 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2392 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2395 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2396 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2397 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2398 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2399 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2400 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2401 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2404 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2405 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2406 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2407 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2408 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2409 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2411 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2412 under certain unusual conditions
2413 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2414 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2417 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2418 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2419 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2420 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2421 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2422 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2423 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2424 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2425 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2426 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2427 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2428 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2429 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2430 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2431 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2432 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2435 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2436 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2439 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2440 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2441 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2442 involving hard-linked directories
2443 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2444 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2445 character-special and block files
2448 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2449 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2450 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2451 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2452 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2453 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2454 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2455 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2456 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2458 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2459 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2460 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2461 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2462 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2463 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2464 specified on the command line.
2465 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2466 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2467 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2468 the first file untouched.
2469 * readlink: new program
2470 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2471 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2472 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2473 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2474 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2475 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2478 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2479 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2480 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2481 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2482 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2483 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2484 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2485 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2486 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2487 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2488 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2489 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2491 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2492 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2493 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2495 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2496 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2497 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2498 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2499 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2500 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2501 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2502 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2505 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2506 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2509 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2510 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2511 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2512 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2513 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2514 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2515 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2518 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2519 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2521 ========================================================================
2522 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2523 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2526 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2528 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2529 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2530 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2531 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2532 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2533 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2534 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2535 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2536 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2537 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2538 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2539 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2541 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2542 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2543 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2544 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2546 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2549 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2551 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2552 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2553 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2554 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2555 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2556 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2557 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2560 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2561 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2562 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2563 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2564 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2565 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2566 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2567 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2568 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2569 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2570 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2571 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2572 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2573 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2574 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2575 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2577 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2578 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2580 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2581 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2582 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2583 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2584 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2585 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2587 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2588 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2589 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2590 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2591 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2592 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2593 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2595 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2596 the source files in the following example:
2597 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2598 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2599 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2600 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2601 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2602 links between source files with --preserve=links
2603 * cp accepts new options:
2604 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2605 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2606 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2607 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2608 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2609 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2610 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2611 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2612 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2614 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2615 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2616 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2617 even though it's older than dest.
2618 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2619 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2620 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2621 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2622 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2624 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2625 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2626 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2627 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2628 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2629 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2630 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2632 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2633 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2634 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2636 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2637 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2638 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2639 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2640 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2641 This is the default.
2643 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2644 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2645 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2646 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2647 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2649 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2652 ========================================================================
2653 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2654 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2657 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2658 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2660 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2661 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2662 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2663 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2664 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2666 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2667 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2668 that specifies a non-directory
2671 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2672 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2673 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2674 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2675 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2676 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2677 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2678 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2679 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2680 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2681 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2682 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2683 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2684 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2685 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2686 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2687 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2688 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2689 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2690 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2691 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2692 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2693 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2694 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2696 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2697 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2698 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2700 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2702 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2703 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2705 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2706 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2707 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2708 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2709 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2711 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2712 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2713 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2714 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2715 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2717 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2719 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2720 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2721 * still more portability fixes
2722 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2723 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2725 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2727 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2729 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2731 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2732 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2733 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2734 there is any time remaining
2735 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2737 ========================================================================
2738 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2739 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2741 This package began as the union of the following:
2742 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2744 ========================================================================
2746 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2748 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2749 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2750 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2751 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2752 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2753 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.