1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
12 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
15 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
19 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
20 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
21 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
22 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
24 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
25 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
26 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
27 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
28 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
33 make check: two tests have been corrected
37 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
38 inherited from gnulib.
41 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
45 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
46 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
47 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
48 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
50 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
51 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
53 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
55 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
56 systems without xattr support.
58 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
59 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
60 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
62 ** Changes in behavior
64 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
65 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
66 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
67 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
69 ** Improved robustness
71 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
72 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
73 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
74 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
75 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
76 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
77 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
79 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
83 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
84 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
86 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
87 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
88 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
89 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
90 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
97 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
98 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
99 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
103 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
104 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
105 data was read, or on process exit.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
108 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
109 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
110 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
113 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
114 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
115 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
118 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
119 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
121 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
124 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
125 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
126 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
128 ** Changes in behavior
130 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
131 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
132 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
134 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
135 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
137 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
138 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
139 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
142 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
146 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
148 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
149 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
150 install: Never copies xattrs
152 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
153 from overwriting any existing destination file
155 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
156 mode where this feature is available.
158 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
159 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
160 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
161 do not modify the destination at all.
163 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
165 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
169 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
172 cp uses much less memory in some situations
174 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
175 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
177 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
178 processing the first file name
180 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
181 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
182 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
183 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
185 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
186 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
188 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
189 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
192 ** Changes in behavior
194 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
195 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
197 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
198 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
199 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
201 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
202 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
204 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
206 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
207 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
208 is still marked with a '+'.
211 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
215 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
216 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
220 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
221 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
222 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
223 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
224 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
225 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
227 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
228 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
230 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
231 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
233 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
235 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
236 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
237 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
239 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
240 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
242 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
243 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
244 used to factor large numbers.
246 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
249 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
251 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
253 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
254 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
256 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
257 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
258 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
259 maximum command-line (argv) length.
261 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
262 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
263 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
265 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
266 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
270 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
272 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
273 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
275 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
276 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
278 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
280 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
281 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
285 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
286 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
287 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
289 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
291 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
292 no matter how many files are in a given directory
294 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
295 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
296 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
298 ** Changes in behavior
300 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
301 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
304 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
308 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
310 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
311 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
312 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
314 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
315 with no USERNAME argument.
317 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
318 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
319 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
321 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
322 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
323 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
324 number of fields for some inputs.
326 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
327 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
329 ** Changes in behavior
331 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
332 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
335 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
339 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
341 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
342 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
343 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
344 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
346 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
347 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
349 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
350 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
352 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
353 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
355 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
356 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
357 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
360 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
361 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
362 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
363 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
364 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
365 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
367 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
368 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
370 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
371 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
374 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
375 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
377 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
378 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
380 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
381 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
382 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
383 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
385 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
386 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
388 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
389 in more cases when a directory is empty.
391 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
392 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
397 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
398 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
400 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
401 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
402 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
403 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
407 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
408 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
410 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
412 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
416 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
417 which have negative errno values.
421 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
425 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
429 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
433 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
437 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
438 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
441 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
442 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
443 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
448 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
449 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
450 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
451 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
454 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
458 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
460 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
461 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
465 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
469 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
470 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
472 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
474 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
476 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
478 ** Programs no longer installed by default
482 ** Changes in behavior
484 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
485 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
487 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
488 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
490 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
491 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
492 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
496 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
497 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
498 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
499 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
500 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
501 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
502 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
503 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
504 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
505 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
506 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
508 The following commands and options now support the standard size
509 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
510 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
513 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
516 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
517 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
518 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
520 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
521 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
522 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
527 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
528 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
529 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
530 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
532 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
533 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
534 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
535 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
536 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
537 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
538 of "make check" fail.
540 ** Remove deprecated options
542 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
543 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
544 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
545 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
546 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
548 ** Improved robustness
550 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
551 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
552 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
553 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
554 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
555 loss of the contents of a/f.
557 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
558 in its 35-colon command-line argument
562 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
563 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
566 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
567 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
568 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
569 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
571 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
572 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
573 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
574 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
575 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
576 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
577 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
578 destination is a symlink.
580 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
582 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
583 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
585 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
586 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
588 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
590 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
591 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
593 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
594 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
596 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
599 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
600 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
602 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
603 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
605 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
606 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
607 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
608 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
610 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
611 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
612 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
614 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
615 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
616 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
618 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
619 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
620 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
621 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
623 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
624 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
625 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
627 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
628 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
630 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
631 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
633 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
635 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
636 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
637 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
639 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
640 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
642 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
643 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
645 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
646 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
648 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
649 [present in the original version]
652 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
656 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
658 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
659 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
660 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
662 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
663 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
665 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
669 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
670 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
672 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
673 support but with insufficient /proc support.
675 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
676 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
678 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
679 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
680 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
681 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
682 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
683 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
685 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
686 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
689 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
690 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
692 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
695 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
696 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
697 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
699 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
700 directory is unreadable.
702 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
703 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
704 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
706 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
707 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
708 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
709 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
710 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
713 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
714 Before it would print nothing.
716 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
718 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
719 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
720 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
721 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
722 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
723 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
724 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
725 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
727 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
731 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
732 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
733 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
735 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
736 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
737 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
738 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
741 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
745 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
746 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
747 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
748 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
749 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
750 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
751 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
753 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
754 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
755 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
756 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
757 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
758 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
759 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
760 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
762 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
763 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
764 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
771 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
772 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
774 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
775 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
776 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
778 ** Improved robustness
780 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
781 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
782 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
785 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
789 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
790 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
791 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
792 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
793 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
795 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
799 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
802 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
806 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
807 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
808 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
809 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
811 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
812 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
814 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
815 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
816 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
819 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
821 ** Improved robustness
823 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
824 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
826 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
827 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
828 or NFS-mounted partition.
830 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
831 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
835 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
836 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
837 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
838 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
839 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
840 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
842 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
843 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
845 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
846 or neglect to report file removal.
848 For the "groups" command:
850 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
851 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
853 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
855 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
857 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
861 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
862 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
865 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
867 ** Changes in behavior
869 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
870 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
871 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
872 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
874 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
875 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
876 a final `./' or `../' component.
878 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
879 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
882 ** Infrastructure changes
884 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
885 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
886 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
887 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
891 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
894 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
895 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
896 dirent.d_type support.
898 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
899 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
901 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
902 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
903 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
904 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
907 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
909 ** Changes in behavior
911 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
915 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
916 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
920 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
921 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
922 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
924 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
925 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
927 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
928 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
930 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
932 ** Improved robustness
934 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
935 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
936 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
938 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
939 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
942 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
943 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
945 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
946 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
948 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
949 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
951 ** Changes in behavior
953 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
954 where the two are distinct.
956 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
957 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
958 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
959 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
960 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
961 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
962 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
963 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
964 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
965 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
966 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
967 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
968 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
969 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
970 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
971 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
972 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
974 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
975 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
976 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
978 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
979 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
980 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
981 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
984 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
985 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
989 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
990 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
991 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
992 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
994 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
995 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
996 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
998 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
999 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1000 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1001 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1002 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1005 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1006 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1008 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1009 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1010 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1011 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1013 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1014 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1015 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1017 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1018 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1019 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1020 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1022 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1023 and sticky) with the -m option.
1025 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1026 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1027 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1028 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1029 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1031 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1032 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1034 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1038 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1039 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1040 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1041 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1043 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1045 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1047 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1048 silently ignoring one of them.
1050 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1051 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1052 containing this change was 5.92.
1054 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1055 automatically newline terminated.
1057 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1058 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1059 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1060 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1063 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1064 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1065 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1068 ** Scheduled for removal
1070 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1071 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1073 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1074 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1075 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1076 command to unlink a directory.
1078 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1079 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1080 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1081 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1085 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1086 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1087 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1088 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1089 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1090 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1094 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1095 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1097 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1099 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1100 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1101 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1103 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1104 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1107 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1108 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1110 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1111 list directories before files.
1113 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1114 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1115 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1116 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1119 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1121 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1123 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1124 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1125 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1127 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1128 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1132 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1133 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1134 usually printing nothing.
1136 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1138 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1139 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1140 them with hard-linked directories.
1142 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1143 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1144 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1146 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1147 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1148 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1150 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1153 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1154 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1156 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1157 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1159 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1160 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1162 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1163 all command-line arguments.
1165 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1167 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1169 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1170 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1172 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1174 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1175 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1176 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1177 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1178 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1180 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1181 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1183 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1184 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1185 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1186 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1188 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1190 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1194 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1195 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1197 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1198 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1200 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1201 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1203 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1204 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1206 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1207 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1209 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1211 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1212 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1213 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1216 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1218 ** Build-related bug fixes
1220 installing .mo files would fail
1223 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1227 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1229 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1232 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1236 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1237 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1241 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1243 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1244 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1246 ** Deprecated options
1248 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1249 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1251 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1255 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1257 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1258 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1259 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1260 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1262 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1265 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1271 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1276 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1278 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1280 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1281 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1282 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1284 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1285 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1286 problematic usages. These include:
1288 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1289 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1290 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1291 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1292 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1293 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1294 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1295 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1296 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1298 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1299 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1301 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1302 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1303 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1304 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1306 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1307 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1308 between binary and text files.
1310 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1314 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1318 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1319 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1321 head tac tail tee tr
1322 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1324 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1325 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1327 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1328 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1329 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1331 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1333 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1335 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1336 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1337 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1341 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1343 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1344 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1346 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1347 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1348 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1352 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1353 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1357 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1358 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1359 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1363 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1364 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1368 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1370 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1372 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1376 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1377 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1378 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1380 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1381 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1382 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1383 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1384 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1386 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1390 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1391 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1392 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1394 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1396 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1397 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1398 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1399 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1401 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1403 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1404 rather than silently wrapping around.
1406 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1407 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1409 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1410 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1412 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1413 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1414 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1415 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1417 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1419 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1421 ** Improved robustness
1423 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1424 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1425 no matter how large the result.
1427 ** Improved portability
1429 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1430 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1432 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1434 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1435 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1436 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1438 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1439 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1443 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1444 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1446 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1448 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1449 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1450 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1451 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1453 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1454 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1456 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1457 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1458 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1460 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1462 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1463 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1465 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1466 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1468 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1470 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1471 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1473 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1474 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1476 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1477 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1478 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1480 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1482 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1484 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1488 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1490 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1491 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1492 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1494 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1495 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1497 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1498 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1499 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1501 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1502 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1504 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1505 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1506 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1507 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1509 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1510 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1512 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1513 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1514 the file system does not support it.
1516 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1518 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1519 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1521 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1523 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1524 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1526 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1527 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1528 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1529 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1531 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1532 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1535 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1536 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1537 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1538 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1540 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1541 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1542 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1543 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1545 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1546 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1548 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1550 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1551 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1552 reporting incorrect results.
1556 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1557 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1559 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1562 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1564 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1565 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1567 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1568 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1570 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1573 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1574 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1575 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1576 the file name does not look like a page range.
1578 printf has several changes:
1580 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1581 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1583 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1584 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1585 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1587 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1588 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1591 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1592 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1594 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1595 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1597 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1599 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1600 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1602 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1604 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1606 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1607 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1608 when first encountering the directory.
1612 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1613 output; POSIX requires this.
1615 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1616 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1618 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1620 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1621 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1623 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1624 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1626 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1627 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1628 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1629 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1630 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1631 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1632 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1634 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1635 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1636 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1638 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1639 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1641 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1643 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1645 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1646 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1647 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1648 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1650 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1654 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1655 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1656 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1657 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1658 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1660 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1661 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1662 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1664 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1665 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1667 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1668 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1670 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1671 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1672 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1673 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1674 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1676 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1677 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1679 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1680 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1682 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1684 nocreat do not create the output file
1685 excl fail if the output file already exists
1686 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1687 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1689 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1691 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1692 direct use direct I/O for data
1693 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1694 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1695 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1696 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1697 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1699 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1701 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1702 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1705 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1706 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1707 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1708 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1709 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1710 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1712 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1713 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1715 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1718 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1720 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1722 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1723 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1725 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1726 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1727 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1729 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1730 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1731 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1733 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1735 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1736 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1738 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1739 for compatibility with bash.
1741 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1743 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1744 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1745 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1746 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1748 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1749 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1751 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1752 ls supports TABSIZE.
1753 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1754 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1755 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1757 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1760 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1762 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1763 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1764 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1765 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1766 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1767 an offset, not as a file name.
1769 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1770 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1772 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1773 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1775 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1776 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1778 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1779 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1780 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1782 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1783 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1785 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1786 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1790 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1792 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1794 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1798 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1799 or more arguments between partitions.
1801 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1802 holes in the destination.
1804 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1805 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1806 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1807 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1808 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1809 terminates immediately.
1811 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1813 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1815 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1816 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1817 not the empty string.
1819 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1820 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1824 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1825 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1826 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1829 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1836 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1840 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1841 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1843 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1844 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1846 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1847 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1848 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1851 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1855 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1856 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1858 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1859 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1861 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1862 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1863 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1865 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1867 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1870 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1872 ** Configuration option
1874 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1875 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1879 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1880 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1884 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1885 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1886 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1889 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1890 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1891 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1892 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1893 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1894 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1895 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1898 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1902 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1903 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1904 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1906 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1907 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1909 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1911 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1912 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1913 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1914 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1916 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1918 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1919 not just the ones that reference directories
1921 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1922 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1924 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1925 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1926 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1928 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1929 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1930 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1931 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1932 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1933 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1935 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1940 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1941 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1943 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1945 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1947 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1949 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1950 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1952 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1953 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1955 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1957 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1961 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1963 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1965 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1966 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1967 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1968 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1969 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1971 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1972 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1974 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1975 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1977 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1978 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1980 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1981 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1982 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1986 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1987 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1988 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1989 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1990 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1991 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1992 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1993 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1994 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1995 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1996 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1997 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1998 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1999 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2001 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2003 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2004 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2006 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2008 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2010 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2011 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2013 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2015 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2016 without a trailing newline.
2018 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2019 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2021 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2024 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2028 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2030 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2032 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2033 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2034 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2035 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2037 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2039 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2040 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2041 be printed without leading spaces.
2043 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2044 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2049 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2050 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2051 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2053 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2055 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2056 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2058 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2059 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2061 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2062 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2064 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2066 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2068 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2070 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2071 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2073 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2075 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2077 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2078 byte offsets are specified.
2081 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2084 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2087 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2088 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2089 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2090 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2091 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2092 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2093 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2094 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2095 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2096 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2097 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2098 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2099 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2100 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2101 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2102 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2103 directory where M has write access.
2104 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2105 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2106 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2109 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2110 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2111 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2112 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2113 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2114 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2115 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2116 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2117 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2118 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2119 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2120 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2121 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2122 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2123 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2124 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2125 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2126 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2127 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2128 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2129 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2130 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2131 appeared one additional time.
2133 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2134 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2135 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2136 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2139 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2140 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2141 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2142 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2143 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2144 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2145 if there were more than 338.
2147 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2148 - false --help now exits nonzero
2151 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2152 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2153 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2154 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2157 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2158 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2159 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2160 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2161 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2164 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2165 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2166 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2167 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2168 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2169 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2170 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2173 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2174 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2175 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2176 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2177 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2178 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2180 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2181 under certain unusual conditions
2182 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2183 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2186 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2187 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2188 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2189 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2190 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2191 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2192 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2193 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2194 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2195 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2196 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2197 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2198 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2199 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2200 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2201 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2204 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2205 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2208 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2209 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2210 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2211 involving hard-linked directories
2212 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2213 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2214 character-special and block files
2217 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2218 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2219 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2220 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2221 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2222 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2223 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2224 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2225 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2227 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2228 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2229 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2230 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2231 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2232 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2233 specified on the command line.
2234 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2235 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2236 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2237 the first file untouched.
2238 * readlink: new program
2239 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2240 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2241 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2242 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2243 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2244 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2247 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2248 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2249 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2250 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2251 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2252 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2253 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2254 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2255 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2256 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2257 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2258 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2260 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2261 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2262 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2264 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2265 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2266 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2267 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2268 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2269 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2270 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2271 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2274 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2275 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2278 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2279 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2280 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2281 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2282 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2283 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2284 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2287 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2288 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2290 ========================================================================
2291 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2292 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2295 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2297 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2298 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2299 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2300 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2301 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2302 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2303 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2304 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2305 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2306 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2307 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2308 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2310 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2311 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2312 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2313 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2315 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2318 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2320 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2321 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2322 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2323 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2324 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2325 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2326 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2329 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2330 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2331 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2332 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2333 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2334 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2335 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2336 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2337 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2338 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2339 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2340 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2341 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2342 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2343 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2344 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2346 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2347 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2349 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2350 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2351 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2352 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2353 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2354 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2356 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2357 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2358 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2359 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2360 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2361 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2362 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2364 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2365 the source files in the following example:
2366 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2367 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2368 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2369 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2370 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2371 links between source files with --preserve=links
2372 * cp accepts new options:
2373 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2374 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2375 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2376 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2377 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2378 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2379 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2380 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2381 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2383 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2384 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2385 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2386 even though it's older than dest.
2387 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2388 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2389 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2390 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2391 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2393 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2394 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2395 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2396 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2397 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2398 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2399 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2401 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2402 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2403 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2405 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2406 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2407 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2408 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2409 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2410 This is the default.
2412 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2413 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2414 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2415 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2416 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2418 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2421 ========================================================================
2422 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2423 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2426 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2427 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2429 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2430 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2431 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2432 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2433 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2435 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2436 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2437 that specifies a non-directory
2440 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2441 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2442 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2443 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2444 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2445 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2446 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2447 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2448 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2449 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2450 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2451 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2452 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2453 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2454 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2455 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2456 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2457 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2458 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2459 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2460 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2461 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2462 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2463 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2465 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2466 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2467 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2469 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2471 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2472 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2474 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2475 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2476 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2477 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2478 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2480 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2481 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2482 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2483 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2484 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2486 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2488 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2489 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2490 * still more portability fixes
2491 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2492 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2494 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2496 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2498 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2500 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2501 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2502 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2503 there is any time remaining
2504 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2506 ========================================================================
2507 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2508 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2510 This package began as the union of the following:
2511 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2513 ========================================================================
2515 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2517 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2518 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2519 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2520 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2521 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2522 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.