1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
8 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
10 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
11 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
13 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
14 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
16 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
17 additional static suffix to output file names.
19 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
20 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
21 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
25 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
26 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
27 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
28 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
29 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
30 typically still point to one of the hard links.
32 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
33 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
34 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
35 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
36 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
40 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
41 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
42 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
45 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
49 realpath: print resolved file names.
53 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
56 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
59 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
60 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
61 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
62 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
63 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
66 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
67 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
68 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
70 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
71 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
74 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
75 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
76 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
77 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
80 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
82 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
85 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
86 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
87 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
89 ** Changes in behavior
91 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
92 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
93 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
94 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
95 usually-short referent instead.
97 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
98 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
99 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
100 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
107 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
108 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
109 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
111 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
112 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
114 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
119 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
120 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
122 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
123 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
124 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
125 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
127 ** Changes in behavior
129 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
130 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
131 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
135 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
136 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
137 only .tar.xz files is enough.
140 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
144 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
145 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
146 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
148 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
149 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
151 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
152 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
153 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
154 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
155 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
157 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
158 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
159 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
160 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
161 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
162 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
163 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
164 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
166 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
167 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
169 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
170 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
172 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
175 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
176 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
177 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
179 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
180 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
181 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
184 ** Changes in behavior
186 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
187 when -v or -c specified.
189 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
190 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
194 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
195 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
196 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
197 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
198 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
200 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
201 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
202 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
204 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
205 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
206 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
207 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
208 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
209 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
210 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
212 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
213 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
214 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
218 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
219 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
221 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
224 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
225 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
227 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
228 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
230 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
231 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
233 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
235 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
239 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
240 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
242 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
249 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
250 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
252 ** Changes in behavior
254 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
255 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
256 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
257 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
258 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
259 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
261 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
262 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
263 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
267 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
270 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
274 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
275 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
278 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
279 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
282 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
283 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
284 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
286 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
289 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
292 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
295 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
296 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
300 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
301 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
302 processed portion thereof.
304 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
305 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
307 ** Changes in behavior
309 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
310 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
311 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
313 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
314 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
315 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
317 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
318 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
320 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
321 Use --preserve-context instead.
323 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
326 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
330 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
331 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
332 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
333 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
336 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
337 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
339 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
340 reject file names invalid for that file system.
342 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
347 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
348 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
349 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
350 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
351 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
352 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
353 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
354 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
356 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
357 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
358 the same number of fields are output for each line.
360 ** Changes in behavior
362 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
363 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
364 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
367 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
371 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
372 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
376 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
380 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
381 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
383 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
384 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
386 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
387 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
389 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
390 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
391 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
394 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
395 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
397 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
398 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
399 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
401 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
403 ** Changes in behavior
405 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
406 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
407 to the number of available processors.
411 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
414 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
418 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
419 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
420 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
421 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
423 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
424 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
425 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
427 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
428 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
430 ** Changes in behavior
432 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
433 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
435 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
436 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
437 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
438 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
439 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
440 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
442 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
443 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
444 the same way as the others.
447 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
451 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
452 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
453 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
455 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
456 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
458 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
459 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
460 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
462 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
465 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
466 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
468 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
469 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
470 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
472 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
473 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
474 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
475 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
479 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
480 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
482 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
485 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
486 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
488 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
490 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
491 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
492 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
494 ** Changes in behavior
496 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
497 rather than its aliased target.
499 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
500 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
501 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
503 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
504 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
505 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
506 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
507 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
508 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
509 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
510 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
512 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
514 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
516 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
517 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
520 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
521 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
522 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
523 control like taskset for example.
525 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
527 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
528 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
529 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
530 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
531 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
532 includes %C when context information is available.
534 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
535 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
536 rather than a file system attribute.
538 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
539 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
540 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
541 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
543 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
544 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
545 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
547 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
548 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
549 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
552 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
556 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
559 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
561 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
562 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
564 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
565 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
566 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
567 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
569 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
570 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
575 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
576 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
578 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
579 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
580 duration after the initial signal was sent.
582 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
583 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
584 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
585 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
586 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
587 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
588 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
589 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
590 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
592 ** Changes in behavior
594 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
595 sequence when it would be a no-op.
597 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
598 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
601 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
605 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
606 of available processors, which may not have been the case
607 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
608 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
612 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
613 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
615 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
616 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
617 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
618 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
620 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
621 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
622 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
625 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
629 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
630 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
633 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
634 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
635 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
637 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
640 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
641 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
642 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
645 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
646 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
649 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
650 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
651 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
654 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
655 renamed-aside and then recreated.
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
658 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
659 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
660 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
663 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
664 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
667 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
668 processes will not intersperse their output.
669 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
672 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
676 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
679 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
680 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
682 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
683 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
684 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
685 the presence of the empty string argument.
686 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
688 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
689 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
690 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
691 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
693 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
696 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
697 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
698 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
700 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
701 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
702 and with a malicious user on the same system
703 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
707 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
711 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
712 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
715 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
716 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
717 offending directory and all "contents."
719 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
720 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
721 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
723 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
724 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
725 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
727 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
728 processes will not intersperse their output.
729 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
730 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
732 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
733 output the name of the file to stdout.
734 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
736 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
737 call fails with errno == EACCES.
738 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
740 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
741 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
744 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
745 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
746 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
748 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
749 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
750 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
751 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
752 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
753 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
755 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
756 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
757 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
758 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
760 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
761 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
763 ** Changes in behavior
765 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
766 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
767 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
768 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
769 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
771 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
772 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
773 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
774 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
776 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
778 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
779 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
780 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
781 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
782 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
786 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
790 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
791 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
793 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
794 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
796 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
797 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
798 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
800 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
801 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
804 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
808 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
809 when the source file doesn't have write access.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
812 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
813 to accommodate leap seconds.
814 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
816 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
817 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
818 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
820 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
822 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
823 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
824 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
826 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
827 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
828 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
829 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
830 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
834 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
835 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
836 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
837 directory or a symlink to a directory.
839 ** Changes in behavior
841 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
842 environment variable is set.
844 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
845 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
846 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
850 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
851 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
852 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
853 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
855 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
856 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
857 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
858 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
862 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
863 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
864 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
866 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
867 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
868 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
869 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
870 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
871 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
874 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
875 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
878 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
882 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
883 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
884 and libraries tested at configure time.
885 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
887 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
890 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
893 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
894 printing a summary to stderr.
895 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
897 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
898 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
899 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
901 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
904 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
905 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
906 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
907 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
909 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
910 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
911 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
912 which is relatively unusual.
913 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
915 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
916 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
917 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
918 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
919 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
920 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
921 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
925 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
926 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
927 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
928 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
929 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
933 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
934 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
936 ** Changes in behavior
938 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
939 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
940 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
941 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
942 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
945 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
949 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
950 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
952 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
953 before data copying has started.
955 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
956 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
958 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
959 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
960 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
961 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
963 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
964 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
965 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
966 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
968 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
973 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
974 for its standard streams.
976 ** Changes in behavior
978 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
979 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
980 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
981 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
982 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
983 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
985 ** Deprecated options
987 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
988 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
992 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
994 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
995 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
998 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1000 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1001 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1003 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1004 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1007 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1011 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1012 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1013 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1014 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1016 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1017 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1018 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1019 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1020 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1025 make check: two tests have been corrected
1029 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1030 inherited from gnulib.
1033 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1037 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1038 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1039 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1040 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1042 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1043 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1045 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1047 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1048 systems without xattr support.
1050 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1051 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1052 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1054 ** Changes in behavior
1056 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1057 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1058 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1059 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1061 ** Improved robustness
1063 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1064 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1065 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1066 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1067 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1068 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1069 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1070 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1071 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1075 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1076 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1078 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1079 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1080 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1081 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1082 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1089 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1090 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1091 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1095 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1096 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1097 data was read, or on process exit.
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1100 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1101 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1102 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1103 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1105 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1106 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1107 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1108 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1110 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1111 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1113 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1114 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1116 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1117 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1118 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1120 ** Changes in behavior
1122 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1123 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1124 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1126 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1127 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1129 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1130 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1131 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1134 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1138 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1140 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1141 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1142 install: Never copies xattrs
1144 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1145 from overwriting any existing destination file
1147 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1148 mode where this feature is available.
1150 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1151 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1152 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1153 do not modify the destination at all.
1155 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1157 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1161 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1162 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1164 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1166 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1167 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1169 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1170 processing the first file name
1172 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1173 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1174 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1175 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1177 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1178 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1180 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1181 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1184 ** Changes in behavior
1186 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1187 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1189 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1190 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1191 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1193 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1194 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1196 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1198 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1199 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1200 is still marked with a '+'.
1203 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1207 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1208 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1212 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1213 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1214 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1215 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1216 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1217 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1219 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1220 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1222 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1223 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1225 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1227 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1228 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1229 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1231 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1232 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1234 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1235 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1236 used to factor large numbers.
1238 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1241 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1243 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1245 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1246 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1248 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1249 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1250 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1251 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1253 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1254 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1255 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1257 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1258 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1262 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1264 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1265 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1267 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1268 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1270 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1272 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1273 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1277 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1278 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1279 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1281 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1283 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1284 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1285 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1287 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1288 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1289 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1291 ** Changes in behavior
1293 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1294 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1297 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1301 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1302 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1303 'futimens' system calls.
1307 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1309 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1310 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1311 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1313 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1314 with no USERNAME argument.
1316 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1317 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1318 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1320 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1321 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1322 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1323 number of fields for some inputs.
1325 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1326 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1328 ** Changes in behavior
1330 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1331 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1334 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1338 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1340 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1341 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1342 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1343 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1345 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1346 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1348 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1349 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1351 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1352 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1354 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1355 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1356 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1357 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1359 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1360 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1361 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1362 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1363 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1364 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1366 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1367 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1369 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1370 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1371 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1373 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1374 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1376 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1377 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1379 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1380 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1381 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1382 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1384 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1385 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1387 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1388 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1390 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1391 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1396 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1397 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1399 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1400 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1401 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1402 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1406 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1407 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1409 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1411 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1415 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1416 which have negative errno values.
1420 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1424 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1428 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1432 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1436 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1437 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1440 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1441 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1442 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1443 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1447 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1448 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1449 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1450 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1453 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1457 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1459 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1460 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1461 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1464 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1468 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1469 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1471 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1473 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1475 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1477 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1481 ** Changes in behavior
1483 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1484 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1486 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1487 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1489 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1490 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1491 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1495 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1496 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1497 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1498 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1499 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1500 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1501 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1502 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1503 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1504 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1505 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1507 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1508 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1509 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1512 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1515 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1516 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1517 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1519 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1520 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1521 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1524 ** New build options
1526 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1527 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1528 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1529 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1531 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1532 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1533 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1534 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1535 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1536 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1537 of "make check" fail.
1539 ** Remove deprecated options
1541 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1542 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1543 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1544 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1545 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1547 ** Improved robustness
1549 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1550 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1551 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1552 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1553 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1554 loss of the contents of a/f.
1556 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1557 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1561 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1562 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1563 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1565 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1566 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1567 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1568 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1570 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1571 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1572 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1573 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1574 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1575 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1576 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1577 destination is a symlink.
1579 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1581 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1582 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1584 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1585 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1587 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1589 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1590 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1592 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1593 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1595 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1598 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1599 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1601 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1602 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1604 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1605 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1606 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1607 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1609 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1610 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1611 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1613 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1614 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1615 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1617 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1618 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1619 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1620 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1622 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1623 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1624 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1626 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1627 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1629 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1630 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1632 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1634 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1635 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1636 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1638 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1639 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1641 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1642 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1644 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1645 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1647 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1648 [present in the original version]
1651 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1655 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1657 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1658 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1659 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1661 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1662 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1664 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1668 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1669 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1671 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1672 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1674 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1675 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1677 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1678 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1679 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1680 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1681 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1682 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1684 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1685 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1688 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1689 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1691 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1694 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1695 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1696 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1698 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1699 directory is unreadable.
1701 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1702 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1703 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1705 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1706 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1707 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1708 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1709 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1712 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1713 Before it would print nothing.
1715 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1717 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1718 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1719 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1720 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1721 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1722 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1723 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1724 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1726 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1730 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1731 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1732 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1734 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1735 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1736 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1737 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1740 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1744 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1745 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1746 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1747 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1748 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1749 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1750 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1752 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1753 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1754 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1755 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1756 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1757 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1758 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1759 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1761 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1762 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1763 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1766 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1770 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1771 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1773 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1774 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1775 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1777 ** Improved robustness
1779 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1780 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1781 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1784 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1788 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1789 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1790 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1791 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1792 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1794 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1798 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1801 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1805 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1806 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1807 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1808 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1810 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1811 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1813 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1814 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1815 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1818 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1820 ** Improved robustness
1822 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1823 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1825 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1826 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1827 or NFS-mounted partition.
1829 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1830 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1834 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1835 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1836 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1837 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1838 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1839 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1841 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1842 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1844 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1845 or neglect to report file removal.
1847 For the "groups" command:
1849 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1850 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1852 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1854 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1856 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1860 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1861 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1864 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1866 ** Changes in behavior
1868 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1869 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1870 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1871 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1873 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1874 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1875 a final './' or '../' component.
1877 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1878 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1879 this only for pipes.
1881 ** Infrastructure changes
1883 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1884 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1885 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1886 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1890 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1891 name is "." or "..".
1893 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1894 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1895 dirent.d_type support.
1897 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1898 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1900 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1901 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1902 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1903 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1906 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1908 ** Changes in behavior
1910 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1914 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1915 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1919 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1920 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1921 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1923 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1924 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1926 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1927 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1929 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1931 ** Improved robustness
1933 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1934 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1935 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1937 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1938 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1941 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1942 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1944 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1945 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1947 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1948 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1950 ** Changes in behavior
1952 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1953 where the two are distinct.
1955 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1956 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1957 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1958 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1959 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1960 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1961 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1962 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1963 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1964 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1965 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1966 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1967 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
1968 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
1969 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
1970 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1971 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1973 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1974 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1975 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1977 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1978 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1979 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1980 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1983 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1984 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1988 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1989 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1990 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1991 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1993 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1994 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1995 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1997 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1998 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1999 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2000 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2001 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2004 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2005 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2007 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2008 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2009 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2010 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2012 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2013 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2014 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2016 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2017 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2018 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2019 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2021 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2022 and sticky) with the -m option.
2024 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2025 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2026 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2027 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2028 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2030 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2031 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2033 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2037 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2038 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2039 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2040 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2042 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2044 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2046 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2047 silently ignoring one of them.
2049 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2050 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2051 containing this change was 5.92.
2053 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2054 automatically newline terminated.
2056 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2057 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2058 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2059 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2062 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2063 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2064 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2067 ** Scheduled for removal
2069 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2070 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2072 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2073 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2074 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2075 command to unlink a directory.
2077 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2078 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2079 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2080 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2084 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2085 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2086 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2087 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2088 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2089 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2093 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2094 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2096 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2098 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2099 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2100 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2102 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2103 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2106 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2107 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2109 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2110 list directories before files.
2112 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2113 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2114 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2115 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2118 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2120 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2122 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2123 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2124 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2126 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2127 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2131 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2132 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2133 usually printing nothing.
2135 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2137 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2138 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2139 them with hard-linked directories.
2141 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2142 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2143 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2145 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2146 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2147 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2149 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2152 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2153 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2155 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2156 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2158 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2159 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2161 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2162 all command-line arguments.
2164 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2166 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2168 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2169 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2171 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2173 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2174 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2175 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2176 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2177 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2179 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2180 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2182 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2183 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2184 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2185 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2187 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2189 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2193 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2194 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2196 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2197 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2199 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2200 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2202 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2203 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2205 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2206 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2208 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2210 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2211 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2212 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2215 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2217 ** Build-related bug fixes
2219 installing .mo files would fail
2222 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2226 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2228 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2231 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2235 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2236 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2240 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2242 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2243 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2245 ** Deprecated options
2247 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2248 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2250 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2254 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2256 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2257 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2258 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2259 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2261 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2264 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2270 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2275 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2277 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2279 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2280 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2281 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2283 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2284 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2285 problematic usages. These include:
2287 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2288 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2289 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2290 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2291 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2292 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2293 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2294 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2295 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2297 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2298 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2300 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2301 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2302 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2303 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2305 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2306 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2307 between binary and text files.
2309 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2313 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2317 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2318 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2320 head tac tail tee tr
2321 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2323 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2324 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2326 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2327 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2328 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2330 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2332 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2334 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2335 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2336 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2340 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2342 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2343 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2345 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2346 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2347 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2351 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2352 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2356 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2357 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2358 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2362 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2363 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2367 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2369 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2371 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2375 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2376 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2377 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2379 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2380 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2381 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2382 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2383 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2385 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2389 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2390 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2391 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2393 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2395 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2396 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2397 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2398 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2400 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2402 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2403 rather than silently wrapping around.
2405 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2406 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2408 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2409 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2411 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2412 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2413 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2414 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2416 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2418 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2420 ** Improved robustness
2422 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2423 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2424 no matter how large the result.
2426 ** Improved portability
2428 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2429 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2431 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2433 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2434 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2435 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2437 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2438 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2442 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2443 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2445 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2447 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2448 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2449 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2450 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2452 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2453 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2455 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2456 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2457 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2459 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2461 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2462 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2464 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2465 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2467 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2469 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2470 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2472 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2473 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2475 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2476 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2477 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2479 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2481 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2483 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2487 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2489 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2490 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2491 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2493 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2494 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2496 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2497 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2498 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2500 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2501 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2503 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2504 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2505 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2506 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2508 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2509 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2511 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2512 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2513 the file system does not support it.
2515 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2517 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2518 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2520 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2522 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2523 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2525 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2526 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2527 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2528 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2530 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2531 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2534 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2535 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2536 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2537 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2539 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2540 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2541 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2542 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2544 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2545 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2547 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2549 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2550 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2551 reporting incorrect results.
2555 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2556 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2558 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2561 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2563 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2564 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2566 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2567 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2569 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2572 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2573 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2574 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2575 the file name does not look like a page range.
2577 printf has several changes:
2579 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2580 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2582 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2583 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2584 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2586 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2587 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2590 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2591 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2593 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2594 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2596 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2598 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2599 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2601 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2603 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2605 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2606 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2607 when first encountering the directory.
2611 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2612 output; POSIX requires this.
2614 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2615 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2617 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2619 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2620 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2622 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2623 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2625 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2626 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2627 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2628 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2629 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2630 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2631 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2633 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2634 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2635 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2637 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2638 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2640 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2642 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2644 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2645 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2646 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2647 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2649 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2653 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2654 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2655 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2656 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2657 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2659 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2660 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2661 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2663 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2664 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2666 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2667 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2669 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2670 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2671 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2672 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2673 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2675 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2676 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2678 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2679 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2681 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2683 nocreat do not create the output file
2684 excl fail if the output file already exists
2685 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2686 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2688 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2690 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2691 direct use direct I/O for data
2692 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2693 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2694 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2695 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2696 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2698 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2700 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2701 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2704 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2705 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2706 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2707 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2708 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2709 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2711 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2712 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2714 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2717 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2719 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2721 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2722 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2724 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2725 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2726 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2728 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2729 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2730 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2732 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2734 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2735 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2737 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2738 for compatibility with bash.
2740 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2742 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2743 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2744 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2745 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2747 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2748 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2750 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2751 ls supports TABSIZE.
2752 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2753 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2754 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2756 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2759 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2761 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2762 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2763 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2764 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2765 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2766 an offset, not as a file name.
2768 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2769 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2771 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2772 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2774 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2775 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2777 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2778 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2779 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2781 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2782 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2784 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2785 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2789 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2791 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2793 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2797 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2798 or more arguments between partitions.
2800 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2801 holes in the destination.
2803 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2804 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2805 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2806 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2807 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2808 terminates immediately.
2810 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2812 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2814 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2815 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2816 not the empty string.
2818 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2819 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2823 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2824 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2825 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2828 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2835 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2839 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2840 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2842 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2843 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2845 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2846 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2847 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2850 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2854 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2855 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2857 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2858 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2860 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2861 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2862 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2864 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2866 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2869 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2871 ** Configuration option
2873 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2874 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2878 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2879 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2883 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2884 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2885 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2888 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2889 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2890 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2891 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2892 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2893 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2894 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2897 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2901 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2902 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2903 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2905 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2906 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2908 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2910 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2911 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2912 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2913 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2915 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2917 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2918 not just the ones that reference directories
2920 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2921 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2923 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2924 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2925 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2927 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2928 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2929 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2930 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2931 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2932 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2934 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2939 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2940 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2942 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2944 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2946 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2948 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2949 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2951 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2952 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2954 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2956 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2960 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2962 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2964 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2965 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2966 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2967 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2968 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2970 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2971 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2973 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2974 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2976 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2977 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2979 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
2980 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2981 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2985 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
2986 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2987 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
2988 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2989 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2990 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2991 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2992 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2993 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2994 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2995 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2996 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2997 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2998 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3000 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3002 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3003 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3005 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3007 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3009 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3010 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3012 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3014 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3015 without a trailing newline.
3017 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3018 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3020 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3023 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3027 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3029 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3031 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3032 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3033 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3034 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3036 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3038 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3039 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3040 be printed without leading spaces.
3042 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3043 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3048 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3049 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3050 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3052 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3054 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3055 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3057 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3058 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3060 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3061 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3063 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3065 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3067 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3069 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3070 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3072 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3074 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3076 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3077 byte offsets are specified.
3080 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3083 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3086 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3087 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3088 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3089 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3090 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3091 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3092 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3093 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3094 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3095 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3096 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3097 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3098 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3099 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3100 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3101 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3102 directory where M has write access.
3103 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3104 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3105 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3108 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3109 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3110 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3111 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3112 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3113 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3114 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3115 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3116 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3117 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3118 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3119 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3120 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3121 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3122 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3123 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3124 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3125 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3126 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3127 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3128 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3129 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3130 appeared one additional time.
3132 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3133 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3134 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3135 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3138 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3139 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3140 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3141 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3142 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3143 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3144 if there were more than 338.
3146 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3147 - false --help now exits nonzero
3150 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3151 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3152 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3153 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3156 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3157 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3158 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3159 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3160 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3163 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3164 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3165 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3166 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3167 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3168 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3169 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3172 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3173 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3174 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3175 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3176 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3177 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3179 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3180 under certain unusual conditions
3181 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3182 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3185 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3186 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3187 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3188 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3189 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3190 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3191 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3192 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3193 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3194 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3195 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3196 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3197 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3198 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3199 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3200 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3203 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3204 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3207 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3208 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3209 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3210 involving hard-linked directories
3211 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3212 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3213 character-special and block files
3216 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3217 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3218 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3219 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3220 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3221 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3222 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3223 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3224 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3226 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3227 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3228 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3229 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3230 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3231 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3232 specified on the command line.
3233 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3234 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3235 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3236 the first file untouched.
3237 * readlink: new program
3238 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3239 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3240 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3241 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3242 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3243 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3246 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3247 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3248 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3249 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3250 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3251 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3252 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3253 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3254 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3255 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3256 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3257 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3259 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3260 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3261 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3263 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3264 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3265 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3266 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3267 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3268 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3269 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3270 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3273 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3274 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3277 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3278 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3279 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3280 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3281 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3282 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3283 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3286 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3287 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3289 ========================================================================
3290 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3291 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3294 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3296 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3297 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3298 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3299 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3300 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3301 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3302 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3303 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3304 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3305 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3306 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3307 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3309 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3310 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3311 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3312 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3314 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3317 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3319 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3320 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3321 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3322 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3323 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3324 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3325 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3328 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3329 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3330 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3331 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3332 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3333 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3334 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3335 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3336 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3337 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3338 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3339 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3340 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3341 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3342 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3343 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3345 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3346 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3348 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3349 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3350 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3351 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3352 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3353 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3355 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3356 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3357 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3358 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3359 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3360 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3361 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3363 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3364 the source files in the following example:
3365 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3366 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3367 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3368 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3369 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3370 links between source files with --preserve=links
3371 * cp accepts new options:
3372 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3373 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3374 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3375 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3376 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3377 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3378 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3379 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3380 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3382 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3383 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3384 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3385 even though it's older than dest.
3386 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3387 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3388 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3389 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3390 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3392 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3393 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3394 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3395 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3396 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3397 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3398 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3400 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3401 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3402 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3404 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3405 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3406 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3407 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3408 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3409 This is the default.
3411 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3412 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3413 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3414 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3415 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3417 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3420 ========================================================================
3421 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3422 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3425 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3426 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3428 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3429 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3430 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3431 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3432 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3434 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3435 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3436 that specifies a non-directory
3439 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3440 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3441 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3442 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3443 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3444 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3445 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3446 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3447 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3448 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3449 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3450 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3451 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3452 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3453 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3454 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3455 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3456 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3457 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3458 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3459 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3460 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3461 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3462 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3464 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3465 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3466 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3468 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3470 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3471 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3473 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3474 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3475 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3476 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3477 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3479 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3480 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3481 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3482 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3483 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3485 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3487 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3488 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3489 * still more portability fixes
3490 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3491 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3493 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3495 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3497 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3499 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3500 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3501 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3502 there is any time remaining
3503 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3505 ========================================================================
3506 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3507 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3509 This package began as the union of the following:
3510 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3512 ========================================================================
3514 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3516 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3517 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3518 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3519 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3520 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3521 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.