1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
8 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
15 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
16 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
17 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
19 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
20 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
22 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
23 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
24 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
26 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
29 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
32 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
33 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
34 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
36 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
37 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
38 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
39 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
43 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
44 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
46 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
49 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
50 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
52 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
54 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
55 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
56 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
58 ** Changes in behavior
60 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
61 rather than its aliased target.
63 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
64 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
65 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
67 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
68 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
69 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
70 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
71 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
72 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
73 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
74 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
76 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
78 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
80 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
81 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
84 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
85 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
86 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
87 control like taskset for example.
89 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
91 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
92 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
93 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
94 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
95 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
96 includes %C when context information is available.
98 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
99 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
100 rather than a file system attribute.
102 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
103 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
104 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
105 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
107 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
108 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
109 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
111 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
112 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
113 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
120 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
123 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
125 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
128 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
129 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
130 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
131 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
133 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
134 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
139 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
140 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
142 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
143 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
144 duration after the initial signal was sent.
146 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
147 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
148 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
149 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
150 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
151 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
152 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
153 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
154 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
156 ** Changes in behavior
158 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
159 sequence when it would be a no-op.
161 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
162 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
165 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
169 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
170 of available processors, which may not have been the case
171 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
176 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
177 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
179 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
180 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
181 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
182 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
184 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
185 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
186 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
189 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
193 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
194 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
197 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
198 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
199 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
201 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
202 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
204 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
205 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
206 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
209 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
210 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
213 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
214 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
215 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
218 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
219 renamed-aside and then recreated.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
222 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
223 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
224 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
227 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
228 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
231 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
232 processes will not intersperse their output.
233 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
236 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
240 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
241 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
243 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
246 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
247 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
248 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
249 the presence of the empty string argument.
250 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
252 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
253 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
254 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
255 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
257 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
260 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
261 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
262 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
264 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
265 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
266 and with a malicious user on the same system
267 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
271 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
275 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
276 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
279 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
280 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
281 offending directory and all "contents."
283 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
284 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
285 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
287 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
288 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
289 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
291 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
292 processes will not intersperse their output.
293 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
294 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
296 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
297 output the name of the file to stdout.
298 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
300 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
301 call fails with errno == EACCES.
302 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
304 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
305 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
308 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
309 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
310 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
312 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
313 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
314 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
315 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
316 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
317 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
319 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
320 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
321 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
322 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
324 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
325 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
327 ** Changes in behavior
329 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
330 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
331 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
332 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
333 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
335 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
336 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
337 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
338 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
340 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
342 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
343 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
344 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
345 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
346 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
350 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
354 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
355 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
357 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
358 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
360 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
361 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
362 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
364 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
365 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
368 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
372 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
373 when the source file doesn't have write access.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
376 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
377 to accommodate leap seconds.
378 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
380 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
381 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
382 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
384 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
386 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
387 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
388 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
390 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
391 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
392 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
393 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
394 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
398 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
399 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
400 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
401 directory or a symlink to a directory.
403 ** Changes in behavior
405 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
406 environment variable is set.
408 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
409 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
410 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
414 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
415 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
416 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
417 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
419 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
420 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
421 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
422 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
426 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
427 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
428 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
430 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
431 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
432 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
433 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
434 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
435 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
438 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
439 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
442 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
446 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
447 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
448 and libraries tested at configure time.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
451 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
454 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
455 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
457 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
458 printing a summary to stderr.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
461 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
462 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
463 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
465 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
466 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
468 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
469 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
470 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
471 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
473 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
474 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
475 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
476 which is relatively unusual.
477 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
479 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
480 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
481 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
482 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
483 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
484 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
485 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
489 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
490 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
491 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
492 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
493 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
497 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
498 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
500 ** Changes in behavior
502 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
503 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
504 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
505 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
506 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
509 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
513 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
514 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
516 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
517 before data copying has started.
519 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
520 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
522 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
523 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
524 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
525 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
527 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
528 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
529 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
530 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
532 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
537 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
538 for its standard streams.
540 ** Changes in behavior
542 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
543 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
544 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
545 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
546 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
547 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
549 ** Deprecated options
551 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
552 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
556 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
558 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
559 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
562 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
564 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
565 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
567 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
568 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
571 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
575 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
576 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
577 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
578 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
580 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
581 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
582 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
583 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
584 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
589 make check: two tests have been corrected
593 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
594 inherited from gnulib.
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
601 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
602 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
603 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
604 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
606 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
607 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
609 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
611 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
612 systems without xattr support.
614 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
615 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
616 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
618 ** Changes in behavior
620 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
621 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
622 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
623 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
625 ** Improved robustness
627 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
628 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
629 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
630 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
631 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
632 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
633 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
634 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
635 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
639 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
640 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
642 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
643 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
644 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
645 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
646 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
649 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
653 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
654 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
655 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
659 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
660 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
661 data was read, or on process exit.
662 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
664 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
665 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
666 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
669 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
670 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
671 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
674 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
675 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
677 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
678 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
680 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
681 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
682 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
684 ** Changes in behavior
686 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
687 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
688 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
690 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
691 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
693 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
694 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
695 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
698 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
702 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
704 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
705 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
706 install: Never copies xattrs
708 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
709 from overwriting any existing destination file
711 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
712 mode where this feature is available.
714 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
715 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
716 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
717 do not modify the destination at all.
719 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
721 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
725 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
728 cp uses much less memory in some situations
730 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
731 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
733 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
734 processing the first file name
736 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
737 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
738 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
739 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
741 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
742 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
744 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
745 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
748 ** Changes in behavior
750 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
751 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
753 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
754 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
755 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
757 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
758 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
760 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
762 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
763 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
764 is still marked with a '+'.
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
771 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
772 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
776 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
777 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
778 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
779 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
780 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
781 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
783 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
784 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
786 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
787 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
789 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
791 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
792 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
793 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
795 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
796 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
798 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
799 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
800 used to factor large numbers.
802 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
805 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
807 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
809 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
810 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
812 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
813 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
814 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
815 maximum command-line (argv) length.
817 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
818 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
819 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
821 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
822 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
826 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
828 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
829 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
831 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
832 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
834 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
836 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
837 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
841 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
842 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
843 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
845 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
847 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
848 no matter how many files are in a given directory
850 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
851 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
852 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
854 ** Changes in behavior
856 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
857 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
860 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
864 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
866 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
867 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
868 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
870 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
871 with no USERNAME argument.
873 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
874 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
875 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
877 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
878 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
879 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
880 number of fields for some inputs.
882 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
883 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
885 ** Changes in behavior
887 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
888 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
891 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
895 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
897 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
898 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
899 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
900 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
902 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
903 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
905 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
906 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
908 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
909 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
911 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
912 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
913 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
914 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
916 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
917 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
918 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
919 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
920 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
921 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
923 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
924 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
926 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
927 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
928 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
930 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
931 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
933 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
934 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
936 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
937 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
938 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
939 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
941 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
942 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
944 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
945 in more cases when a directory is empty.
947 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
948 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
949 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
953 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
954 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
956 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
957 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
958 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
959 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
963 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
964 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
966 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
968 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
972 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
973 which have negative errno values.
977 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
981 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
985 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
989 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
993 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
994 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
995 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
997 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
998 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
999 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1004 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1005 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1006 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1007 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1010 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1014 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1016 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1017 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1018 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1021 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1025 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1026 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1028 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1030 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1032 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1034 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1038 ** Changes in behavior
1040 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1041 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1043 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1044 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1046 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1047 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1048 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1052 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1053 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1054 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1055 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1056 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1057 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1058 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1059 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1060 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1061 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1062 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1064 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1065 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1066 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1069 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1072 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1073 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1074 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1076 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1077 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1078 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1081 ** New build options
1083 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1084 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1085 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1086 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1088 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1089 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1090 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1091 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1092 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1093 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1094 of "make check" fail.
1096 ** Remove deprecated options
1098 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1099 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1100 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1101 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1102 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1104 ** Improved robustness
1106 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1107 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1108 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1109 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1110 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1111 loss of the contents of a/f.
1113 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1114 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1118 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1119 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1122 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1123 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1124 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1125 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1127 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1128 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1129 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1130 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1131 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1132 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1133 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1134 destination is a symlink.
1136 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1138 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1139 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1141 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1142 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1144 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1146 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1147 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1149 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1150 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1152 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1155 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1156 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1158 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1159 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1161 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1162 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1163 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1164 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1166 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1167 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1168 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1170 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1171 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1172 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1174 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1175 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1176 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1177 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1179 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1180 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1181 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1183 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1184 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1186 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1187 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1189 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1191 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1192 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1193 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1195 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1196 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1198 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1199 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1201 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1202 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1204 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1205 [present in the original version]
1208 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1212 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1214 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1215 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1216 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1218 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1219 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1221 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1225 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1226 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1228 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1229 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1231 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1232 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1234 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1235 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1236 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1237 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1238 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1239 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1241 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1242 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1245 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1246 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1248 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1251 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1252 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1253 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1255 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1256 directory is unreadable.
1258 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1259 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1260 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1262 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1263 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1264 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1265 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1266 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1269 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1270 Before it would print nothing.
1272 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1274 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1275 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1276 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1277 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1278 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1279 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1280 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1281 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1283 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1287 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1288 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1289 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1291 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1292 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1293 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1294 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1297 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1301 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1302 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1303 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1304 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1305 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1306 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1307 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1309 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1310 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1311 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1312 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1313 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1314 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1315 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1316 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1318 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1319 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1320 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1323 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1327 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1328 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1330 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1331 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1332 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1334 ** Improved robustness
1336 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1337 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1338 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1341 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1345 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1346 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1347 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1348 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1349 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1351 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1355 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1358 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1362 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1363 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1364 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1365 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1367 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1368 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1370 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1371 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1372 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1375 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1377 ** Improved robustness
1379 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1380 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1382 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1383 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1384 or NFS-mounted partition.
1386 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1387 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1391 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1392 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1393 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1394 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1395 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1396 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1398 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1399 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1401 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1402 or neglect to report file removal.
1404 For the "groups" command:
1406 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1407 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1409 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1411 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1413 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1417 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1418 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1421 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1423 ** Changes in behavior
1425 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1426 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1427 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1428 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1430 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1431 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1432 a final `./' or `../' component.
1434 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1435 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1436 this only for pipes.
1438 ** Infrastructure changes
1440 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1441 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1442 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1443 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1447 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1448 name is "." or "..".
1450 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1451 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1452 dirent.d_type support.
1454 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1455 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1457 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1458 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1459 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1460 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1463 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1465 ** Changes in behavior
1467 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1471 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1472 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1476 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1477 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1478 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1480 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1481 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1483 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1484 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1486 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1488 ** Improved robustness
1490 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1491 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1492 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1494 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1495 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1498 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1499 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1501 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1502 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1504 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1505 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1507 ** Changes in behavior
1509 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1510 where the two are distinct.
1512 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1513 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1514 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1515 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1516 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1517 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1518 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1519 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1520 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1521 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1522 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1523 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1524 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1525 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1526 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1527 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1528 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1530 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1531 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1532 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1534 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1535 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1536 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1537 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1540 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1541 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1545 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1546 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1547 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1548 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1550 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1551 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1552 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1554 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1555 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1556 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1557 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1558 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1561 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1562 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1564 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1565 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1566 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1567 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1569 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1570 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1571 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1573 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1574 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1575 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1576 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1578 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1579 and sticky) with the -m option.
1581 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1582 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1583 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1584 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1585 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1587 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1588 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1590 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1594 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1595 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1596 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1597 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1599 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1601 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1603 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1604 silently ignoring one of them.
1606 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1607 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1608 containing this change was 5.92.
1610 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1611 automatically newline terminated.
1613 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1614 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1615 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1616 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1619 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1620 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1621 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1624 ** Scheduled for removal
1626 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1627 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1629 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1630 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1631 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1632 command to unlink a directory.
1634 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1635 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1636 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1637 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1641 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1642 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1643 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1644 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1645 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1646 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1650 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1651 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1653 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1655 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1656 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1657 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1659 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1660 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1663 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1664 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1666 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1667 list directories before files.
1669 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1670 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1671 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1672 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1675 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1677 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1679 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1680 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1681 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1683 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1684 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1688 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1689 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1690 usually printing nothing.
1692 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1694 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1695 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1696 them with hard-linked directories.
1698 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1699 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1700 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1702 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1703 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1704 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1706 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1709 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1710 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1712 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1713 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1715 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1716 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1718 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1719 all command-line arguments.
1721 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1723 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1725 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1726 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1728 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1730 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1731 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1732 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1733 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1734 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1736 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1737 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1739 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1740 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1741 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1742 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1744 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1746 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1750 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1751 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1753 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1754 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1756 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1757 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1759 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1760 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1762 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1763 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1765 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1767 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1768 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1769 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1772 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1774 ** Build-related bug fixes
1776 installing .mo files would fail
1779 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1783 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1785 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1788 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1792 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1793 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1797 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1799 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1800 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1802 ** Deprecated options
1804 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1805 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1807 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1811 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1813 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1814 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1815 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1816 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1818 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1821 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1827 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1832 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1834 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1836 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1837 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1838 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1840 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1841 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1842 problematic usages. These include:
1844 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1845 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1846 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1847 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1848 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1849 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1850 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1851 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1852 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1854 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1855 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1857 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1858 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1859 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1860 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1862 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1863 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1864 between binary and text files.
1866 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1870 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1874 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1875 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1877 head tac tail tee tr
1878 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1880 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1881 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1883 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1884 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1885 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1887 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1889 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1891 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1892 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1893 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1897 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1899 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1900 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1902 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1903 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1904 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1908 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1909 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1913 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1914 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1915 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1919 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1920 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1924 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1926 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1928 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1932 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1933 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1934 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1936 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1937 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1938 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1939 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1940 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1942 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1946 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1947 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1948 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1950 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1952 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1953 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1954 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1955 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1957 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1959 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1960 rather than silently wrapping around.
1962 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1963 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1965 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1966 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1968 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1969 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1970 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1971 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1973 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1975 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1977 ** Improved robustness
1979 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1980 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1981 no matter how large the result.
1983 ** Improved portability
1985 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1986 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1988 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1990 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1991 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1992 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1994 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1995 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1999 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2000 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2002 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2004 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2005 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2006 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2007 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2009 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2010 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2012 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2013 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2014 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2016 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2018 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2019 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2021 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2022 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2024 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2026 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2027 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2029 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2030 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2032 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2033 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2034 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2036 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2038 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2040 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2044 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2046 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2047 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2048 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2050 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2051 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2053 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2054 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2055 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2057 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2058 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2060 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2061 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2062 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2063 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2065 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2066 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2068 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2069 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2070 the file system does not support it.
2072 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2074 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2075 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2077 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2079 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2080 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2082 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2083 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2084 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2085 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2087 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2088 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2091 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2092 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2093 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2094 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2096 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2097 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2098 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2099 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2101 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2102 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2104 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2106 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2107 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2108 reporting incorrect results.
2112 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2113 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2115 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2118 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2120 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2121 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2123 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2124 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2126 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2129 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2130 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2131 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2132 the file name does not look like a page range.
2134 printf has several changes:
2136 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2137 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2139 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2140 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2141 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2143 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2144 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2147 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2148 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2150 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2151 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2153 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2155 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2156 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2158 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2160 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2162 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2163 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2164 when first encountering the directory.
2168 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2169 output; POSIX requires this.
2171 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2172 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2174 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2176 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2177 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2179 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2180 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2182 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2183 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2184 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2185 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2186 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2187 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2188 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2190 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2191 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2192 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2194 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2195 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2197 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2199 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2201 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2202 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2203 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2204 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2206 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2210 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2211 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2212 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2213 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2214 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2216 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2217 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2218 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2220 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2221 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2223 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2224 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2226 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2227 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2228 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2229 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2230 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2232 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2233 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2235 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2236 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2238 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2240 nocreat do not create the output file
2241 excl fail if the output file already exists
2242 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2243 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2245 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2247 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2248 direct use direct I/O for data
2249 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2250 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2251 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2252 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2253 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2255 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2257 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2258 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2261 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2262 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2263 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2264 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2265 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2266 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2268 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2269 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2271 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2274 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2276 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2278 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2279 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2281 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2282 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2283 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2285 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2286 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2287 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2289 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2291 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2292 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2294 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2295 for compatibility with bash.
2297 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2299 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2300 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2301 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2302 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2304 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2305 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2307 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2308 ls supports TABSIZE.
2309 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2310 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2311 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2313 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2316 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2318 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2319 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2320 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2321 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2322 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2323 an offset, not as a file name.
2325 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2326 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2328 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2329 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2331 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2332 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2334 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2335 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2336 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2338 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2339 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2341 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2342 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2346 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2348 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2350 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2354 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2355 or more arguments between partitions.
2357 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2358 holes in the destination.
2360 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2361 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2362 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2363 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2364 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2365 terminates immediately.
2367 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2369 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2371 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2372 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2373 not the empty string.
2375 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2376 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2380 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2381 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2382 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2385 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2392 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2396 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2397 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2399 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2400 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2402 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2403 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2404 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2407 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2411 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2412 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2414 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2415 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2417 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2418 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2419 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2421 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2423 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2426 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2428 ** Configuration option
2430 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2431 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2435 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2436 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2440 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2441 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2442 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2445 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2446 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2447 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2448 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2449 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2450 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2451 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2454 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2458 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2459 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2460 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2462 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2463 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2465 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2467 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2468 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2469 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2470 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2472 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2474 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2475 not just the ones that reference directories
2477 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2478 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2480 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2481 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2482 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2484 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2485 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2486 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2487 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2488 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2489 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2491 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2496 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2497 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2499 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2501 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2503 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2505 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2506 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2508 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2509 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2511 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2513 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2517 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2519 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2521 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2522 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2523 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2524 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2525 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2527 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2528 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2530 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2531 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2533 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2534 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2536 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2537 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2538 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2542 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2543 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2544 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2545 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2546 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2547 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2548 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2549 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2550 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2551 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2552 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2553 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2554 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2555 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2557 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2559 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2560 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2562 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2564 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2566 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2567 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2569 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2571 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2572 without a trailing newline.
2574 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2575 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2577 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2580 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2584 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2586 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2588 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2589 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2590 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2591 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2593 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2595 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2596 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2597 be printed without leading spaces.
2599 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2600 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2605 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2606 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2607 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2609 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2611 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2612 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2614 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2615 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2617 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2618 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2620 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2622 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2624 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2626 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2627 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2629 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2631 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2633 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2634 byte offsets are specified.
2637 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2640 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2643 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2644 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2645 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2646 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2647 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2648 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2649 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2650 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2651 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2652 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2653 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2654 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2655 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2656 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2657 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2658 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2659 directory where M has write access.
2660 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2661 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2662 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2665 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2666 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2667 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2668 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2669 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2670 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2671 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2672 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2673 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2674 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2675 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2676 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2677 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2678 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2679 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2680 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2681 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2682 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2683 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2684 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2685 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2686 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2687 appeared one additional time.
2689 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2690 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2691 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2692 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2695 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2696 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2697 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2698 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2699 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2700 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2701 if there were more than 338.
2703 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2704 - false --help now exits nonzero
2707 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2708 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2709 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2710 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2713 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2714 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2715 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2716 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2717 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2720 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2721 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2722 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2723 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2724 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2725 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2726 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2729 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2730 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2731 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2732 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2733 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2734 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2736 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2737 under certain unusual conditions
2738 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2739 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2742 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2743 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2744 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2745 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2746 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2747 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2748 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2749 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2750 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2751 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2752 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2753 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2754 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2755 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2756 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2757 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2760 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2761 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2764 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2765 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2766 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2767 involving hard-linked directories
2768 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2769 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2770 character-special and block files
2773 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2774 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2775 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2776 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2777 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2778 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2779 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2780 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2781 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2783 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2784 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2785 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2786 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2787 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2788 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2789 specified on the command line.
2790 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2791 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2792 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2793 the first file untouched.
2794 * readlink: new program
2795 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2796 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2797 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2798 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2799 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2800 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2803 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2804 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2805 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2806 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2807 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2808 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2809 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2810 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2811 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2812 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2813 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2814 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2816 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2817 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2818 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2820 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2821 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2822 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2823 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2824 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2825 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2826 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2827 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2830 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2831 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2834 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2835 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2836 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2837 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2838 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2839 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2840 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2843 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2844 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2846 ========================================================================
2847 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2848 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2851 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2853 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2854 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2855 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2856 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2857 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2858 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2859 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2860 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2861 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2862 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2863 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2864 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2866 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2867 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2868 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2869 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2871 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2874 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2876 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2877 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2878 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2879 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2880 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2881 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2882 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2885 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2886 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2887 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2888 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2889 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2890 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2891 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2892 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2893 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2894 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2895 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2896 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2897 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2898 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2899 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2900 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2902 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2903 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2905 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2906 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2907 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2908 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2909 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2910 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2912 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2913 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2914 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2915 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2916 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2917 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2918 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2920 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2921 the source files in the following example:
2922 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2923 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2924 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2925 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2926 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2927 links between source files with --preserve=links
2928 * cp accepts new options:
2929 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2930 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2931 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2932 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2933 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2934 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2935 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2936 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2937 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2939 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2940 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2941 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2942 even though it's older than dest.
2943 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2944 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2945 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2946 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2947 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2949 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2950 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2951 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2952 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2953 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2954 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2955 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2957 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2958 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2959 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2961 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2962 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2963 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2964 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2965 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2966 This is the default.
2968 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2969 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2970 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2971 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2972 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2974 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2977 ========================================================================
2978 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2979 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2982 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2983 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2985 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2986 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2987 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2988 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2989 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2991 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2992 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2993 that specifies a non-directory
2996 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2997 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2998 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2999 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3000 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3001 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3002 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3003 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3004 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3005 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3006 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3007 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3008 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3009 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3010 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3011 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3012 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3013 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3014 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3015 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3016 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3017 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3018 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3019 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3021 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3022 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3023 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3025 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3027 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3028 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3030 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3031 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3032 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3033 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3034 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3036 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3037 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3038 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3039 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3040 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3042 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3044 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3045 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3046 * still more portability fixes
3047 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3048 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3050 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3052 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3054 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3056 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3057 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3058 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3059 there is any time remaining
3060 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3062 ========================================================================
3063 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3064 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3066 This package began as the union of the following:
3067 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3069 ========================================================================
3071 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3073 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3074 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3075 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3076 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3077 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3078 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.