1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
8 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
11 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
14 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
17 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
20 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
25 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
26 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
27 processed portion thereof.
29 ** Changes in behavior
31 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
32 The sync in only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.38.
33 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
35 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
36 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
38 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
41 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
45 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
46 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
47 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
48 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
51 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
52 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
54 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
55 reject file names invalid for that file system.
57 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
62 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
63 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
64 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
65 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
66 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
67 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
68 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
69 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
71 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
72 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
73 the same number of fields are output for each line.
75 ** Changes in behavior
77 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
78 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
79 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
82 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
86 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
87 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
91 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
95 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
96 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
98 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
99 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
101 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
102 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
104 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
105 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
106 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
109 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
110 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
112 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
113 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
114 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
116 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
118 ** Changes in behavior
120 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
121 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
122 to the number of available processors.
126 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
129 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
133 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
134 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
135 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
136 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
138 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
139 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
140 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
142 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
143 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
145 ** Changes in behavior
147 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
148 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
150 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
151 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
152 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
153 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
154 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
155 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
157 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
158 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
159 the same way as the others.
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
166 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
167 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
168 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
170 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
171 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
173 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
174 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
175 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
177 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
180 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
181 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
183 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
184 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
185 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
187 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
188 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
189 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
190 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
194 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
195 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
197 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
200 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
201 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
203 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
205 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
206 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
207 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
209 ** Changes in behavior
211 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
212 rather than its aliased target.
214 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
215 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
216 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
218 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
219 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
220 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
221 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
222 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
223 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
224 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
225 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
227 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
229 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
231 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
232 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
235 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
236 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
237 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
238 control like taskset for example.
240 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
242 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
243 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
244 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
245 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
246 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
247 includes %C when context information is available.
249 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
250 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
251 rather than a file system attribute.
253 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
254 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
255 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
256 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
258 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
259 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
260 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
262 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
263 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
264 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
267 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
271 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
274 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
276 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
279 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
280 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
281 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
282 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
284 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
285 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
290 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
291 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
293 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
294 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
295 duration after the initial signal was sent.
297 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
298 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
299 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
300 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
301 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
302 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
303 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
304 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
305 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
307 ** Changes in behavior
309 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
310 sequence when it would be a no-op.
312 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
313 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
320 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
321 of available processors, which may not have been the case
322 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
327 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
328 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
330 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
331 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
332 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
333 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
335 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
336 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
337 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
340 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
344 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
345 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
348 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
349 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
350 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
352 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
353 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
355 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
356 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
357 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
360 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
361 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
364 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
365 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
366 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
369 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
370 renamed-aside and then recreated.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
373 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
374 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
375 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
378 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
379 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
382 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
383 processes will not intersperse their output.
384 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
387 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
391 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
394 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
395 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
397 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
398 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
399 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
400 the presence of the empty string argument.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
403 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
404 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
405 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
406 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
408 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
409 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
411 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
412 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
413 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
415 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
416 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
417 and with a malicious user on the same system
418 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
422 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
426 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
427 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
430 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
431 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
432 offending directory and all "contents."
434 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
435 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
436 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
438 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
439 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
440 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
442 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
443 processes will not intersperse their output.
444 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
445 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
447 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
448 output the name of the file to stdout.
449 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
451 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
452 call fails with errno == EACCES.
453 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
455 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
456 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
459 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
460 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
461 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
463 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
464 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
465 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
466 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
467 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
468 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
470 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
471 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
472 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
473 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
475 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
476 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
478 ** Changes in behavior
480 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
481 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
482 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
483 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
484 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
486 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
487 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
488 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
489 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
491 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
493 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
494 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
495 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
496 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
497 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
501 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
505 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
506 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
508 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
509 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
511 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
512 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
513 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
515 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
516 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
519 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
523 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
524 when the source file doesn't have write access.
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
527 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
528 to accommodate leap seconds.
529 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
531 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
532 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
535 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
537 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
538 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
539 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
541 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
542 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
543 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
544 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
545 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
549 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
550 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
551 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
552 directory or a symlink to a directory.
554 ** Changes in behavior
556 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
557 environment variable is set.
559 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
560 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
561 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
565 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
566 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
567 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
568 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
570 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
571 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
572 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
573 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
577 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
578 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
579 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
581 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
582 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
583 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
584 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
585 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
586 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
589 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
590 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
593 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
597 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
598 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
599 and libraries tested at configure time.
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
602 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
605 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
608 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
609 printing a summary to stderr.
610 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
612 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
613 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
614 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
616 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
619 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
620 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
621 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
622 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
624 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
625 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
626 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
627 which is relatively unusual.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
630 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
631 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
632 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
633 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
634 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
635 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
640 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
641 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
642 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
643 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
644 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
648 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
649 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
651 ** Changes in behavior
653 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
654 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
655 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
656 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
657 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
660 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
664 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
665 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
667 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
668 before data copying has started.
670 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
671 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
673 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
674 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
675 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
676 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
678 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
679 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
680 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
681 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
683 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
688 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
689 for its standard streams.
691 ** Changes in behavior
693 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
694 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
695 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
696 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
697 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
698 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
700 ** Deprecated options
702 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
703 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
707 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
709 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
710 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
713 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
715 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
716 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
718 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
719 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
722 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
726 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
727 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
728 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
729 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
731 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
732 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
733 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
734 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
735 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
740 make check: two tests have been corrected
744 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
745 inherited from gnulib.
748 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
752 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
753 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
754 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
755 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
757 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
758 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
760 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
762 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
763 systems without xattr support.
765 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
766 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
767 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
769 ** Changes in behavior
771 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
772 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
773 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
774 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
776 ** Improved robustness
778 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
779 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
780 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
781 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
782 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
783 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
784 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
785 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
786 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
790 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
791 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
793 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
794 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
795 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
796 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
797 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
800 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
804 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
805 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
806 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
810 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
811 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
812 data was read, or on process exit.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
815 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
816 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
817 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
818 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
820 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
821 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
822 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
823 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
825 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
826 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
828 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
829 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
831 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
832 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
833 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
835 ** Changes in behavior
837 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
838 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
839 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
841 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
842 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
844 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
845 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
846 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
849 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
853 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
855 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
856 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
857 install: Never copies xattrs
859 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
860 from overwriting any existing destination file
862 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
863 mode where this feature is available.
865 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
866 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
867 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
868 do not modify the destination at all.
870 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
872 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
876 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
879 cp uses much less memory in some situations
881 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
882 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
884 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
885 processing the first file name
887 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
888 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
889 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
890 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
892 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
893 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
895 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
896 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
899 ** Changes in behavior
901 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
902 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
904 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
905 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
906 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
908 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
909 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
911 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
913 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
914 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
915 is still marked with a '+'.
918 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
922 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
923 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
927 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
928 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
929 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
930 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
931 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
932 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
934 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
935 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
937 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
938 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
940 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
942 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
943 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
944 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
946 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
947 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
949 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
950 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
951 used to factor large numbers.
953 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
956 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
958 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
960 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
961 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
963 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
964 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
965 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
966 maximum command-line (argv) length.
968 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
969 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
970 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
972 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
973 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
977 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
979 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
980 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
982 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
983 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
985 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
987 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
988 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
992 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
993 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
994 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
996 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
998 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
999 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1001 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1002 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1003 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1005 ** Changes in behavior
1007 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1008 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1011 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1015 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1017 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1018 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1019 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1021 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1022 with no USERNAME argument.
1024 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1025 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1026 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1028 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1029 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1030 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1031 number of fields for some inputs.
1033 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1034 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1036 ** Changes in behavior
1038 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1039 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1042 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1046 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1048 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1049 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1050 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1051 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1053 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1054 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1056 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1057 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1059 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1060 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1062 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1063 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1064 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1065 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1067 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1068 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1069 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1070 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1071 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1072 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1074 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1075 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1077 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1078 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1079 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1081 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1082 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1084 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1085 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1087 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1088 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1089 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1090 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1092 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1093 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1095 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1096 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1098 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1099 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1100 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1104 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1105 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1107 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1108 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1109 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1110 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1114 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1115 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1117 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1119 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1123 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1124 which have negative errno values.
1128 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1132 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1136 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1137 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1140 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1144 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1145 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1146 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1148 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1149 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1150 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1151 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1155 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1156 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1157 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1158 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1161 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1165 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1167 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1168 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1172 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1176 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1177 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1179 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1181 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1183 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1185 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1189 ** Changes in behavior
1191 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1192 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1194 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1195 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1197 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1198 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1199 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1203 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1204 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1205 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1206 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1207 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1208 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1209 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1210 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1211 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1212 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1213 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1215 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1216 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1217 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1220 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1223 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1224 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1225 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1227 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1228 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1229 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1232 ** New build options
1234 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1235 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1236 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1237 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1239 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1240 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1241 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1242 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1243 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1244 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1245 of "make check" fail.
1247 ** Remove deprecated options
1249 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1250 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1251 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1252 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1253 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1255 ** Improved robustness
1257 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1258 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1259 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1260 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1261 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1262 loss of the contents of a/f.
1264 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1265 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1269 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1270 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1273 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1274 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1275 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1276 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1278 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1279 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1280 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1281 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1282 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1283 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1284 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1285 destination is a symlink.
1287 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1289 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1290 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1292 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1293 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1295 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1297 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1298 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1300 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1301 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1303 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1306 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1307 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1309 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1310 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1312 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1313 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1314 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1315 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1317 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1318 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1319 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1321 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1322 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1323 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1325 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1326 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1327 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1328 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1330 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1331 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1332 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1334 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1335 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1337 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1338 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1340 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1342 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1343 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1344 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1346 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1347 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1349 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1350 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1352 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1353 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1355 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1356 [present in the original version]
1359 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1363 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1365 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1366 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1367 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1369 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1370 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1372 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1376 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1377 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1379 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1380 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1382 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1383 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1385 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1386 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1387 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1388 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1389 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1390 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1392 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1393 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1396 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1397 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1399 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1402 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1403 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1404 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1406 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1407 directory is unreadable.
1409 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1410 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1411 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1413 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1414 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1415 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1416 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1417 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1420 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1421 Before it would print nothing.
1423 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1425 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1426 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1427 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1428 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1429 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1430 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1431 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1432 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1434 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1438 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1439 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1440 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1442 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1443 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1444 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1445 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1448 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1452 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1453 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1454 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1455 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1456 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1457 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1458 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1460 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1461 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1462 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1463 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1464 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1465 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1466 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1467 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1469 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1470 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1471 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1474 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1478 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1479 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1481 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1482 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1483 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1485 ** Improved robustness
1487 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1488 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1489 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1492 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1496 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1497 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1498 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1499 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1500 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1502 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1506 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1509 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1513 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1514 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1515 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1516 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1518 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1519 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1521 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1522 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1523 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1526 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1528 ** Improved robustness
1530 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1531 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1533 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1534 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1535 or NFS-mounted partition.
1537 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1538 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1542 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1543 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1544 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1545 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1546 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1547 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1549 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1550 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1552 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1553 or neglect to report file removal.
1555 For the "groups" command:
1557 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1558 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1560 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1562 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1564 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1568 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1569 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1572 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1574 ** Changes in behavior
1576 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1577 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1578 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1579 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1581 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1582 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1583 a final `./' or `../' component.
1585 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1586 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1587 this only for pipes.
1589 ** Infrastructure changes
1591 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1592 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1593 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1594 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1598 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1599 name is "." or "..".
1601 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1602 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1603 dirent.d_type support.
1605 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1606 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1608 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1609 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1610 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1611 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1614 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1616 ** Changes in behavior
1618 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1622 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1623 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1627 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1628 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1629 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1631 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1632 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1634 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1635 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1637 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1639 ** Improved robustness
1641 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1642 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1643 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1645 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1646 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1649 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1650 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1652 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1653 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1655 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1656 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1658 ** Changes in behavior
1660 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1661 where the two are distinct.
1663 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1664 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1665 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1666 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1667 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1668 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1669 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1670 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1671 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1672 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1673 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1674 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1675 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1676 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1677 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1678 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1679 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1681 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1682 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1683 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1685 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1686 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1687 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1688 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1691 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1692 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1696 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1697 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1698 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1699 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1701 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1702 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1703 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1705 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1706 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1707 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1708 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1709 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1712 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1713 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1715 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1716 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1717 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1718 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1720 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1721 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1722 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1724 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1725 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1726 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1727 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1729 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1730 and sticky) with the -m option.
1732 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1733 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1734 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1735 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1736 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1738 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1739 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1741 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1745 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1746 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1747 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1748 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1750 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1752 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1754 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1755 silently ignoring one of them.
1757 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1758 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1759 containing this change was 5.92.
1761 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1762 automatically newline terminated.
1764 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1765 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1766 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1767 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1770 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1771 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1772 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1775 ** Scheduled for removal
1777 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1778 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1780 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1781 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1782 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1783 command to unlink a directory.
1785 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1786 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1787 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1788 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1792 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1793 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1794 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1795 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1796 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1797 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1801 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1802 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1804 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1806 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1807 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1808 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1810 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1811 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1814 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1815 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1817 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1818 list directories before files.
1820 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1821 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1822 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1823 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1826 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1828 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1830 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1831 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1832 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1834 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1835 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1839 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1840 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1841 usually printing nothing.
1843 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1845 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1846 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1847 them with hard-linked directories.
1849 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1850 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1851 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1853 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1854 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1855 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1857 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1860 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1861 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1863 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1864 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1866 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1867 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1869 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1870 all command-line arguments.
1872 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1874 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1876 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1877 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1879 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1881 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1882 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1883 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1884 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1885 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1887 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1888 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1890 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1891 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1892 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1893 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1895 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1897 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1901 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1902 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1904 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1905 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1907 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1908 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1910 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1911 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1913 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1914 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1916 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1918 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1919 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1920 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1923 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1925 ** Build-related bug fixes
1927 installing .mo files would fail
1930 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1934 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1936 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1939 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1943 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1944 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1948 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1950 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1951 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1953 ** Deprecated options
1955 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1956 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1958 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1962 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1964 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1965 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1966 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1967 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1969 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1972 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1978 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1983 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1985 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1987 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1988 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1989 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1991 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1992 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1993 problematic usages. These include:
1995 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1996 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1997 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1998 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1999 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2000 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2001 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2002 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2003 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2005 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2006 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2008 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2009 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2010 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2011 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2013 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2014 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2015 between binary and text files.
2017 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2021 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2025 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2026 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2028 head tac tail tee tr
2029 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2031 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2032 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2034 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2035 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2036 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2038 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2040 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2042 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2043 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2044 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2048 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2050 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2051 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2053 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2054 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2055 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2059 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2060 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2064 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2065 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2066 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2070 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2071 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2075 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2077 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2079 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2083 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2084 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2085 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2087 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2088 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2089 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2090 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2091 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2093 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2097 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2098 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2099 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2101 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2103 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2104 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2105 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2106 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2108 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2110 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2111 rather than silently wrapping around.
2113 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2114 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2116 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2117 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2119 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2120 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2121 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2122 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2124 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2126 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2128 ** Improved robustness
2130 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2131 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2132 no matter how large the result.
2134 ** Improved portability
2136 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2137 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2139 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2141 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2142 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2143 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2145 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2146 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2150 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2151 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2153 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2155 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2156 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2157 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2158 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2160 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2161 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2163 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2164 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2165 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2167 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2169 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2170 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2172 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2173 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2175 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2177 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2178 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2180 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2181 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2183 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2184 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2185 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2187 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2189 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2191 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2195 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2197 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2198 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2199 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2201 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2202 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2204 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2205 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2206 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2208 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2209 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2211 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2212 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2213 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2214 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2216 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2217 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2219 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2220 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2221 the file system does not support it.
2223 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2225 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2226 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2228 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2230 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2231 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2233 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2234 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2235 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2236 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2238 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2239 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2242 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2243 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2244 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2245 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2247 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2248 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2249 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2250 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2252 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2253 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2255 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2257 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2258 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2259 reporting incorrect results.
2263 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2264 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2266 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2269 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2271 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2272 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2274 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2275 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2277 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2280 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2281 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2282 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2283 the file name does not look like a page range.
2285 printf has several changes:
2287 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2288 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2290 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2291 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2292 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2294 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2295 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2298 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2299 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2301 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2302 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2304 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2306 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2307 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2309 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2311 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2313 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2314 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2315 when first encountering the directory.
2319 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2320 output; POSIX requires this.
2322 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2323 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2325 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2327 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2328 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2330 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2331 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2333 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2334 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2335 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2336 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2337 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2338 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2339 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2341 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2342 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2343 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2345 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2346 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2348 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2350 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2352 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2353 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2354 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2355 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2357 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2361 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2362 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2363 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2364 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2365 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2367 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2368 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2369 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2371 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2372 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2374 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2375 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2377 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2378 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2379 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2380 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2381 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2383 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2384 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2386 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2387 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2389 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2391 nocreat do not create the output file
2392 excl fail if the output file already exists
2393 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2394 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2396 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2398 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2399 direct use direct I/O for data
2400 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2401 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2402 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2403 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2404 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2406 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2408 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2409 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2412 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2413 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2414 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2415 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2416 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2417 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2419 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2420 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2422 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2425 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2427 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2429 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2430 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2432 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2433 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2434 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2436 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2437 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2438 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2440 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2442 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2443 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2445 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2446 for compatibility with bash.
2448 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2450 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2451 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2452 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2453 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2455 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2456 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2458 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2459 ls supports TABSIZE.
2460 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2461 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2462 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2464 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2467 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2469 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2470 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2471 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2472 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2473 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2474 an offset, not as a file name.
2476 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2477 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2479 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2480 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2482 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2483 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2485 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2486 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2487 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2489 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2490 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2492 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2493 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2497 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2499 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2501 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2505 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2506 or more arguments between partitions.
2508 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2509 holes in the destination.
2511 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2512 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2513 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2514 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2515 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2516 terminates immediately.
2518 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2520 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2522 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2523 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2524 not the empty string.
2526 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2527 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2531 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2532 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2533 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2536 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2543 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2547 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2548 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2550 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2551 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2553 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2554 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2555 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2558 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2562 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2563 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2565 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2566 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2568 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2569 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2570 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2572 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2574 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2577 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2579 ** Configuration option
2581 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2582 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2586 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2587 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2591 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2592 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2593 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2596 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2597 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2598 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2599 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2600 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2601 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2602 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2605 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2609 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2610 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2611 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2613 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2614 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2616 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2618 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2619 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2620 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2621 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2623 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2625 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2626 not just the ones that reference directories
2628 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2629 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2631 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2632 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2633 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2635 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2636 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2637 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2638 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2639 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2640 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2642 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2647 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2648 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2650 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2652 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2654 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2656 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2657 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2659 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2660 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2662 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2664 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2668 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2670 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2672 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2673 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2674 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2675 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2676 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2678 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2679 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2681 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2682 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2684 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2685 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2687 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2688 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2689 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2693 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2694 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2695 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2696 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2697 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2698 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2699 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2700 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2701 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2702 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2703 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2704 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2705 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2706 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2708 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2710 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2711 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2713 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2715 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2717 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2718 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2720 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2722 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2723 without a trailing newline.
2725 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2726 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2728 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2731 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2735 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2737 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2739 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2740 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2741 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2742 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2744 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2746 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2747 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2748 be printed without leading spaces.
2750 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2751 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2756 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2757 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2758 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2760 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2762 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2763 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2765 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2766 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2768 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2769 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2771 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2773 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2775 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2777 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2778 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2780 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2782 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2784 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2785 byte offsets are specified.
2788 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2791 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2794 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2795 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2796 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2797 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2798 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2799 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2800 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2801 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2802 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2803 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2804 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2805 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2806 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2807 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2808 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2809 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2810 directory where M has write access.
2811 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2812 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2813 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2816 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2817 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2818 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2819 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2820 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2821 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2822 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2823 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2824 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2825 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2826 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2827 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2828 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2829 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2830 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2831 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2832 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2833 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2834 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2835 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2836 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2837 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2838 appeared one additional time.
2840 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2841 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2842 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2843 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2846 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2847 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2848 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2849 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2850 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2851 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2852 if there were more than 338.
2854 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2855 - false --help now exits nonzero
2858 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2859 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2860 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2861 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2864 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2865 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2866 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2867 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2868 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2871 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2872 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2873 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2874 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2875 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2876 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2877 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2880 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2881 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2882 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2883 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2884 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2885 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2887 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2888 under certain unusual conditions
2889 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2890 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2893 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2894 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2895 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2896 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2897 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2898 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2899 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2900 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2901 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2902 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2903 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2904 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2905 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2906 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2907 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2908 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2911 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2912 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2915 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2916 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2917 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2918 involving hard-linked directories
2919 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2920 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2921 character-special and block files
2924 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2925 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2926 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2927 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2928 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2929 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2930 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2931 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2932 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2934 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2935 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2936 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2937 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2938 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2939 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2940 specified on the command line.
2941 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2942 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2943 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2944 the first file untouched.
2945 * readlink: new program
2946 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2947 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2948 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2949 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2950 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2951 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2954 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2955 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2956 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2957 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2958 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2959 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2960 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2961 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2962 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2963 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2964 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2965 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2967 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2968 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2969 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2971 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2972 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2973 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2974 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2975 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2976 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2977 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2978 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2981 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2982 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2985 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2986 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2987 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2988 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2989 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2990 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2991 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2994 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2995 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2997 ========================================================================
2998 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2999 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3002 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3004 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3005 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3006 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3007 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3008 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3009 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3010 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3011 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3012 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3013 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3014 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3015 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3017 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3018 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3019 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3020 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3022 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3025 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3027 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3028 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3029 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3030 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3031 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3032 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3033 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3036 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3037 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3038 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3039 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3040 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3041 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3042 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3043 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3044 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3045 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3046 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3047 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3048 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3049 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3050 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3051 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3053 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3054 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3056 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3057 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3058 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3059 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3060 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3061 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3063 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3064 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3065 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3066 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3067 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3068 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3069 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3071 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3072 the source files in the following example:
3073 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3074 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3075 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3076 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3077 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3078 links between source files with --preserve=links
3079 * cp accepts new options:
3080 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3081 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3082 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3083 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3084 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3085 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3086 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3087 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3088 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3090 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3091 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3092 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3093 even though it's older than dest.
3094 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3095 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3096 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3097 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3098 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3100 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3101 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3102 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3103 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3104 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3105 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3106 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3108 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3109 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3110 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3112 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3113 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3114 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3115 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3116 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3117 This is the default.
3119 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3120 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3121 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3122 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3123 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3125 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3128 ========================================================================
3129 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3130 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3133 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3134 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3136 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3137 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3138 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3139 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3140 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3142 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3143 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3144 that specifies a non-directory
3147 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3148 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3149 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3150 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3151 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3152 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3153 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3154 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3155 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3156 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3157 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3158 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3159 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3160 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3161 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3162 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3163 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3164 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3165 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3166 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3167 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3168 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3169 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3170 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3172 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3173 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3174 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3176 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3178 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3179 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3181 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3182 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3183 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3184 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3185 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3187 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3188 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3189 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3190 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3191 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3193 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3195 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3196 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3197 * still more portability fixes
3198 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3199 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3201 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3203 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3205 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3207 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3208 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3209 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3210 there is any time remaining
3211 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3213 ========================================================================
3214 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3215 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3217 This package began as the union of the following:
3218 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3220 ========================================================================
3222 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3224 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3225 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3226 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3227 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3228 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3229 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.