1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
8 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
9 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
11 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
14 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
19 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
20 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
22 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
23 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
24 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
25 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
27 ** Changes in behavior
29 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
30 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
31 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
35 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
36 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
37 only .tar.xz files is enough.
40 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
44 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
45 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
46 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
48 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
49 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
51 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
52 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
53 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
54 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
55 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
57 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
58 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
59 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
60 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
61 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
62 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
63 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
64 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
66 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
67 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
69 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
70 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
72 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
75 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
76 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
77 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
79 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
80 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
81 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
82 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
84 ** Changes in behavior
86 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
87 when -v or -c specified.
89 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
90 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
94 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
95 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
96 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
97 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
98 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
100 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
101 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
102 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
104 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
105 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
106 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
107 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
108 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
109 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
110 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
112 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
113 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
114 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
118 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
119 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
121 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
124 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
125 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
127 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
128 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
130 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
131 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
133 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
135 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
139 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
140 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
142 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
149 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
150 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
152 ** Changes in behavior
154 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
155 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
156 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
157 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
158 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
159 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
161 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
162 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
163 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
167 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
174 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
175 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
178 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
179 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
182 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
183 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
186 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
189 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
192 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
195 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
200 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
201 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
202 processed portion thereof.
204 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
205 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
207 ** Changes in behavior
209 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
210 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
211 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
213 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
214 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
215 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
217 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
218 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
220 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
221 Use --preserve-context instead.
223 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
226 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
230 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
231 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
232 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
233 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
236 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
237 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
239 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
240 reject file names invalid for that file system.
242 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
247 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
248 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
249 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
250 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
251 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
252 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
253 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
254 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
256 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
257 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
258 the same number of fields are output for each line.
260 ** Changes in behavior
262 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
263 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
264 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
267 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
271 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
272 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
276 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
280 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
281 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
283 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
284 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
286 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
287 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
289 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
290 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
291 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
294 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
295 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
297 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
298 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
299 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
301 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
303 ** Changes in behavior
305 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
306 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
307 to the number of available processors.
311 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
314 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
318 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
319 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
320 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
321 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
323 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
324 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
325 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
327 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
328 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
330 ** Changes in behavior
332 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
333 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
335 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
336 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
337 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
338 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
339 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
340 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
342 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
343 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
344 the same way as the others.
347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
351 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
352 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
353 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
355 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
356 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
358 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
359 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
360 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
362 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
365 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
368 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
369 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
370 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
372 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
373 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
374 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
375 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
379 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
380 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
382 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
385 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
386 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
388 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
390 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
391 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
392 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
394 ** Changes in behavior
396 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
397 rather than its aliased target.
399 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
400 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
401 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
403 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
404 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
405 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
406 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
407 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
408 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
409 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
410 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
412 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
414 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
416 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
417 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
420 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
421 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
422 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
423 control like taskset for example.
425 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
427 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
428 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
429 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
430 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
431 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
432 includes %C when context information is available.
434 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
435 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
436 rather than a file system attribute.
438 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
439 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
440 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
441 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
443 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
444 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
445 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
447 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
448 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
449 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
452 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
456 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
459 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
461 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
464 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
465 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
466 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
467 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
469 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
470 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
475 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
476 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
478 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
479 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
480 duration after the initial signal was sent.
482 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
483 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
484 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
485 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
486 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
487 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
488 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
489 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
490 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
492 ** Changes in behavior
494 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
495 sequence when it would be a no-op.
497 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
498 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
501 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
505 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
506 of available processors, which may not have been the case
507 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
512 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
513 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
515 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
516 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
517 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
518 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
520 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
521 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
522 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
529 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
530 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
533 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
534 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
535 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
537 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
540 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
541 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
542 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
545 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
546 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
549 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
550 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
551 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
554 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
555 renamed-aside and then recreated.
556 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
558 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
559 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
560 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
563 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
564 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
565 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
567 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
568 processes will not intersperse their output.
569 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
576 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
579 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
582 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
583 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
584 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
585 the presence of the empty string argument.
586 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
588 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
589 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
590 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
591 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
593 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
594 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
596 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
597 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
598 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
600 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
601 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
602 and with a malicious user on the same system
603 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
607 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
611 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
612 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
615 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
616 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
617 offending directory and all "contents."
619 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
620 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
621 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
623 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
624 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
625 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
627 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
628 processes will not intersperse their output.
629 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
630 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
632 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
633 output the name of the file to stdout.
634 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
636 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
637 call fails with errno == EACCES.
638 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
640 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
641 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
644 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
645 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
646 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
648 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
649 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
650 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
651 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
652 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
653 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
655 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
656 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
657 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
658 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
660 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
661 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
663 ** Changes in behavior
665 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
666 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
667 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
668 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
669 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
671 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
672 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
673 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
674 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
676 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
678 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
679 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
680 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
681 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
682 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
686 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
690 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
691 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
693 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
694 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
696 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
697 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
698 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
700 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
701 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
704 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
708 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
709 when the source file doesn't have write access.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
712 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
713 to accommodate leap seconds.
714 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
716 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
717 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
720 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
722 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
723 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
724 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
726 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
727 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
728 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
729 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
730 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
734 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
735 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
736 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
737 directory or a symlink to a directory.
739 ** Changes in behavior
741 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
742 environment variable is set.
744 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
745 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
746 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
750 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
751 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
752 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
753 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
755 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
756 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
757 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
758 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
762 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
763 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
764 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
766 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
767 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
768 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
769 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
770 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
771 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
774 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
775 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
778 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
782 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
783 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
784 and libraries tested at configure time.
785 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
787 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
790 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
791 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
793 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
794 printing a summary to stderr.
795 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
797 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
798 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
799 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
801 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
802 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
804 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
805 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
806 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
807 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
809 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
810 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
811 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
812 which is relatively unusual.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
815 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
816 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
817 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
818 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
819 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
820 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
821 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
825 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
826 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
827 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
828 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
829 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
833 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
834 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
836 ** Changes in behavior
838 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
839 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
840 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
841 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
842 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
845 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
849 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
850 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
852 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
853 before data copying has started.
855 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
856 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
858 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
859 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
860 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
861 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
863 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
864 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
865 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
866 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
868 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
873 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
874 for its standard streams.
876 ** Changes in behavior
878 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
879 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
880 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
881 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
882 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
883 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
885 ** Deprecated options
887 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
888 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
892 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
894 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
895 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
898 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
900 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
901 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
903 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
904 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
907 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
911 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
912 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
913 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
914 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
916 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
917 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
918 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
919 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
920 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
925 make check: two tests have been corrected
929 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
930 inherited from gnulib.
933 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
937 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
938 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
939 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
940 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
942 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
943 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
945 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
947 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
948 systems without xattr support.
950 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
951 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
952 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
954 ** Changes in behavior
956 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
957 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
958 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
959 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
961 ** Improved robustness
963 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
964 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
965 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
966 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
967 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
968 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
969 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
970 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
971 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
975 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
976 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
978 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
979 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
980 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
981 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
982 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
985 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
989 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
990 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
991 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
995 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
996 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
997 data was read, or on process exit.
998 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1000 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1001 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1002 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1003 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1005 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1006 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1007 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1008 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1010 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1011 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1013 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1014 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1016 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1017 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1018 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1020 ** Changes in behavior
1022 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1023 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1024 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1026 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1027 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1029 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1030 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1031 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1034 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1038 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1040 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1041 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1042 install: Never copies xattrs
1044 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1045 from overwriting any existing destination file
1047 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1048 mode where this feature is available.
1050 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1051 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1052 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1053 do not modify the destination at all.
1055 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1057 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1061 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1062 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1064 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1066 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1067 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1069 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1070 processing the first file name
1072 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1073 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1074 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1075 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1077 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1078 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1080 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1081 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1084 ** Changes in behavior
1086 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1087 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1089 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1090 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1091 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1093 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1094 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1096 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1098 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1099 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1100 is still marked with a '+'.
1103 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1107 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1108 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1112 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1113 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1114 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1115 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1116 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1117 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1119 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1120 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1122 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1123 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1125 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1127 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1128 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1129 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1131 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1132 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1134 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1135 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1136 used to factor large numbers.
1138 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1141 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1143 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1145 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1146 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1148 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1149 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1150 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1151 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1153 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1154 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1155 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1157 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1158 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1162 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1164 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1165 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1167 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1168 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1170 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1172 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1173 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1177 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1178 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1179 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1181 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1183 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1184 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1185 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1187 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1188 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1189 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1191 ** Changes in behavior
1193 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1194 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1197 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1201 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1202 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1203 'futimens' system calls.
1207 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1209 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1210 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1211 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1213 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1214 with no USERNAME argument.
1216 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1217 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1218 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1220 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1221 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1222 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1223 number of fields for some inputs.
1225 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1226 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1228 ** Changes in behavior
1230 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1231 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1234 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1238 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1240 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1241 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1242 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1243 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1245 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1246 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1248 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1249 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1251 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1252 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1254 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1255 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1256 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1259 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1260 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1261 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1262 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1263 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1264 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1266 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1267 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1269 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1270 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1273 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1274 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1276 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1277 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1279 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1280 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1281 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1282 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1284 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1285 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1287 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1288 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1290 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1291 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1292 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1296 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1297 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1299 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1300 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1301 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1302 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1306 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1307 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1309 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1311 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1315 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1316 which have negative errno values.
1320 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1324 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1328 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1332 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1336 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1337 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1338 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1340 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1341 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1342 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1343 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1347 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1348 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1349 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1350 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1353 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1357 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1359 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1360 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1364 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1368 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1369 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1371 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1373 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1375 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1377 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1381 ** Changes in behavior
1383 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1384 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1386 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1387 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1389 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1390 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1391 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1395 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1396 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1397 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1398 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1399 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1400 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1401 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1402 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1403 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1404 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1405 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1407 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1408 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1409 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1412 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1415 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1416 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1417 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1419 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1420 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1421 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1424 ** New build options
1426 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1427 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1428 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1429 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1431 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1432 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1433 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1434 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1435 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1436 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1437 of "make check" fail.
1439 ** Remove deprecated options
1441 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1442 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1443 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1444 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1445 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1447 ** Improved robustness
1449 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1450 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1451 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1452 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1453 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1454 loss of the contents of a/f.
1456 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1457 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1461 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1462 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1463 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1465 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1466 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1467 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1468 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1470 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1471 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1472 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1473 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1474 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1475 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1476 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1477 destination is a symlink.
1479 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1481 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1482 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1484 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1485 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1487 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1489 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1490 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1492 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1493 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1495 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1498 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1499 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1501 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1502 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1504 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1505 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1506 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1507 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1509 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1510 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1511 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1513 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1514 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1515 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1517 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1518 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1519 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1520 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1522 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1523 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1524 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1526 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1527 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1529 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1530 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1532 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1534 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1535 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1536 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1538 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1539 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1541 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1542 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1544 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1545 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1547 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1548 [present in the original version]
1551 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1555 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1557 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1558 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1559 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1561 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1562 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1564 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1568 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1569 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1571 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1572 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1574 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1575 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1577 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1578 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1579 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1580 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1581 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1582 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1584 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1585 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1588 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1589 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1591 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1594 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1595 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1596 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1598 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1599 directory is unreadable.
1601 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1602 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1603 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1605 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1606 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1607 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1608 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1609 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1612 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1613 Before it would print nothing.
1615 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1617 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1618 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1619 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1620 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1621 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1622 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1623 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1624 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1626 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1630 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1631 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1632 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1634 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1635 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1636 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1637 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1640 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1644 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1645 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1646 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1647 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1648 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1649 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1650 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1652 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1653 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1654 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1655 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1656 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1657 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1658 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1659 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1661 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1662 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1663 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1666 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1670 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1671 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1673 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1674 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1675 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1677 ** Improved robustness
1679 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1680 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1681 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1684 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1688 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1689 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1690 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1691 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1692 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1694 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1698 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1701 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1705 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1706 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1707 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1708 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1710 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1711 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1713 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1714 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1715 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1718 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1720 ** Improved robustness
1722 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1723 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1725 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1726 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1727 or NFS-mounted partition.
1729 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1730 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1734 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1735 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1736 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1737 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1738 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1739 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1741 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1742 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1744 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1745 or neglect to report file removal.
1747 For the "groups" command:
1749 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1750 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1752 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1754 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1756 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1760 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1761 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1764 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1766 ** Changes in behavior
1768 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1769 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1770 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1771 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1773 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1774 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1775 a final `./' or `../' component.
1777 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1778 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1779 this only for pipes.
1781 ** Infrastructure changes
1783 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1784 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1785 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1786 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1790 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1791 name is "." or "..".
1793 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1794 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1795 dirent.d_type support.
1797 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1798 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1800 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1801 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1802 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1803 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1806 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1808 ** Changes in behavior
1810 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1814 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1815 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1819 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1820 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1821 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1823 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1824 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1826 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1827 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1829 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1831 ** Improved robustness
1833 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1834 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1835 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1837 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1838 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1841 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1842 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1844 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1845 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1847 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1848 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1850 ** Changes in behavior
1852 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1853 where the two are distinct.
1855 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1856 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1857 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1858 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1859 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1860 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1861 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1862 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1863 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1864 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1865 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1866 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1867 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1868 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1869 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1870 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1871 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1873 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1874 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1875 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1877 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1878 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1879 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1880 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1883 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1884 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1888 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1889 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1890 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1891 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1893 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1894 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1895 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1897 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1898 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1899 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1900 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1901 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1904 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1905 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1907 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1908 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1909 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1910 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1912 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1913 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1914 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1916 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1917 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1918 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1919 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1921 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1922 and sticky) with the -m option.
1924 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1925 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1926 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1927 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1928 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1930 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1931 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1933 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1937 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1938 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1939 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1940 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1942 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1944 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1946 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1947 silently ignoring one of them.
1949 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1950 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1951 containing this change was 5.92.
1953 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1954 automatically newline terminated.
1956 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1957 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1958 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1959 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1962 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1963 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1964 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1967 ** Scheduled for removal
1969 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1970 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1972 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1973 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1974 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1975 command to unlink a directory.
1977 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1978 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1979 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1980 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1984 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1985 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1986 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1987 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1988 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1989 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1993 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1994 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1996 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1998 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1999 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2000 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2002 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2003 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2006 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2007 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2009 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2010 list directories before files.
2012 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2013 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2014 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2015 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2018 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2020 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2022 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2023 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2024 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2026 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2027 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2031 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2032 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2033 usually printing nothing.
2035 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2037 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2038 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2039 them with hard-linked directories.
2041 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2042 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2043 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2045 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2046 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2047 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2049 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2052 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2053 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2055 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2056 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2058 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2059 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2061 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2062 all command-line arguments.
2064 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2066 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2068 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2069 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2071 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2073 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2074 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2075 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2076 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2077 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2079 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2080 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2082 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2083 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2084 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2085 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2087 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2089 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2093 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2094 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2096 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2097 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2099 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2100 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2102 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2103 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2105 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2106 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2108 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2110 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2111 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2112 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2115 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2117 ** Build-related bug fixes
2119 installing .mo files would fail
2122 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2126 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2128 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2131 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2135 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2136 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2140 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2142 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2143 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2145 ** Deprecated options
2147 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2148 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2150 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2154 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2156 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2157 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2158 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2159 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2161 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2164 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2170 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2175 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2177 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2179 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2180 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2181 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2183 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2184 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2185 problematic usages. These include:
2187 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2188 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2189 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2190 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2191 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2192 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2193 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2194 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2195 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2197 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2198 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2200 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2201 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2202 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2203 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2205 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2206 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2207 between binary and text files.
2209 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2213 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2217 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2218 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2220 head tac tail tee tr
2221 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2223 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2224 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2226 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2227 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2228 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2230 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2232 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2234 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2235 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2236 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2240 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2242 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2243 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2245 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2246 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2247 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2251 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2252 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2256 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2257 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2258 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2262 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2263 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2267 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2269 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2271 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2275 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2276 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2277 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2279 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2280 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2281 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2282 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2283 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2285 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2289 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2290 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2291 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2293 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2295 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2296 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2297 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2298 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2300 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2302 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2303 rather than silently wrapping around.
2305 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2306 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2308 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2309 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2311 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2312 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2313 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2314 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2316 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2318 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2320 ** Improved robustness
2322 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2323 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2324 no matter how large the result.
2326 ** Improved portability
2328 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2329 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2331 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2333 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2334 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2335 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2337 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2338 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2342 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2343 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2345 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2347 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2348 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2349 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2350 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2352 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2353 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2355 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2356 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2357 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2359 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2361 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2362 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2364 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2365 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2367 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2369 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2370 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2372 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2373 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2375 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2376 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2377 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2379 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2381 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2383 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2387 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2389 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2390 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2391 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2393 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2394 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2396 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2397 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2398 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2400 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2401 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2403 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2404 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2405 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2406 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2408 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2409 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2411 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2412 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2413 the file system does not support it.
2415 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2417 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2418 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2420 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2422 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2423 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2425 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2426 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2427 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2428 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2430 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2431 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2434 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2435 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2436 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2437 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2439 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2440 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2441 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2442 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2444 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2445 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2447 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2449 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2450 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2451 reporting incorrect results.
2455 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2456 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2458 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2461 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2463 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2464 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2466 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2467 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2469 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2472 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2473 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2474 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2475 the file name does not look like a page range.
2477 printf has several changes:
2479 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2480 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2482 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2483 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2484 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2486 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2487 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2490 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2491 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2493 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2494 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2496 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2498 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2499 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2501 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2503 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2505 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2506 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2507 when first encountering the directory.
2511 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2512 output; POSIX requires this.
2514 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2515 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2517 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2519 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2520 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2522 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2523 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2525 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2526 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2527 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2528 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2529 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2530 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2531 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2533 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2534 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2535 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2537 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2538 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2540 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2542 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2544 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2545 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2546 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2547 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2549 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2553 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2554 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2555 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2556 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2557 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2559 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2560 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2561 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2563 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2564 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2566 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2567 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2569 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2570 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2571 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2572 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2573 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2575 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2576 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2578 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2579 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2581 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2583 nocreat do not create the output file
2584 excl fail if the output file already exists
2585 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2586 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2588 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2590 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2591 direct use direct I/O for data
2592 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2593 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2594 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2595 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2596 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2598 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2600 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2601 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2604 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2605 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2606 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2607 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2608 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2609 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2611 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2612 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2614 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2617 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2619 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2621 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2622 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2624 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2625 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2626 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2628 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2629 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2630 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2632 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2634 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2635 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2637 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2638 for compatibility with bash.
2640 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2642 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2643 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2644 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2645 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2647 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2648 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2650 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2651 ls supports TABSIZE.
2652 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2653 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2654 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2656 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2659 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2661 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2662 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2663 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2664 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2665 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2666 an offset, not as a file name.
2668 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2669 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2671 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2672 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2674 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2675 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2677 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2678 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2679 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2681 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2682 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2684 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2685 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2689 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2691 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2693 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2697 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2698 or more arguments between partitions.
2700 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2701 holes in the destination.
2703 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2704 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2705 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2706 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2707 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2708 terminates immediately.
2710 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2712 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2714 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2715 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2716 not the empty string.
2718 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2719 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2723 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2724 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2725 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2728 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2735 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2739 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2740 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2742 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2743 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2745 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2746 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2747 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2750 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2754 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2755 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2757 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2758 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2760 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2761 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2762 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2764 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2766 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2769 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2771 ** Configuration option
2773 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2774 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2778 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2779 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2783 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2784 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2785 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2788 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2789 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2790 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2791 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2792 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2793 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2794 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2797 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2801 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2802 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2803 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2805 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2806 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2808 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2810 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2811 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2812 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2813 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2815 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2817 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2818 not just the ones that reference directories
2820 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2821 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2823 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2824 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2825 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2827 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2828 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2829 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2830 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2831 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2832 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2834 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2839 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2840 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2842 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2844 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2846 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2848 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2849 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2851 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2852 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2854 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2856 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2860 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2862 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2864 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2865 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2866 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2867 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2868 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2870 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2871 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2873 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2874 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2876 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2877 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2879 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2880 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2881 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2885 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2886 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2887 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2888 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2889 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2890 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2891 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2892 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2893 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2894 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2895 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2896 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2897 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2898 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2900 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2902 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2903 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2905 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2907 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2909 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2910 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2912 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2914 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2915 without a trailing newline.
2917 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2918 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2920 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2923 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2927 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2929 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2931 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2932 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2933 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2934 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2936 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2938 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2939 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2940 be printed without leading spaces.
2942 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2943 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2948 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2949 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2950 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2952 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2954 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2955 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2957 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2958 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2960 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2961 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2963 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2965 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2967 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2969 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2970 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2972 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2974 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2976 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2977 byte offsets are specified.
2980 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2983 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2986 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2987 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2988 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2989 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2990 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2991 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2992 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2993 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2994 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2995 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2996 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2997 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2998 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2999 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3000 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3001 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3002 directory where M has write access.
3003 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3004 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3005 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3008 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3009 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3010 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3011 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3012 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3013 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3014 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3015 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3016 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3017 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3018 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3019 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3020 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3021 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3022 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3023 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3024 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3025 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3026 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3027 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3028 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3029 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3030 appeared one additional time.
3032 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3033 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3034 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3035 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3038 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3039 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3040 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3041 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3042 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3043 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3044 if there were more than 338.
3046 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3047 - false --help now exits nonzero
3050 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3051 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3052 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3053 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3056 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3057 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3058 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3059 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3060 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3063 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3064 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3065 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3066 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3067 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3068 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3069 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3072 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3073 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3074 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3075 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3076 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3077 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3079 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3080 under certain unusual conditions
3081 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3082 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3085 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3086 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3087 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3088 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3089 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3090 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3091 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3092 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3093 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3094 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3095 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3096 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3097 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3098 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3099 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3100 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3103 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3104 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3107 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3108 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3109 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3110 involving hard-linked directories
3111 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3112 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3113 character-special and block files
3116 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3117 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3118 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3119 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3120 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3121 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3122 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3123 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3124 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3126 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3127 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3128 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3129 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3130 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3131 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3132 specified on the command line.
3133 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3134 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3135 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3136 the first file untouched.
3137 * readlink: new program
3138 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3139 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3140 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3141 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3142 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3143 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3146 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3147 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3148 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3149 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3150 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3151 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3152 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3153 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3154 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3155 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3156 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3157 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3159 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3160 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3161 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3163 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3164 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3165 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3166 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3167 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3168 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3169 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3170 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3173 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3174 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3177 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3178 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3179 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3180 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3181 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3182 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3183 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3186 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3187 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3189 ========================================================================
3190 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3191 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3194 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3196 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3197 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3198 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3199 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3200 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3201 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3202 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3203 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3204 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3205 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3206 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3207 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3209 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3210 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3211 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3212 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3214 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3217 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3219 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3220 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3221 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3222 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3223 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3224 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3225 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3228 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3229 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3230 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3231 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3232 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3233 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3234 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3235 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3236 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3237 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3238 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3239 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3240 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3241 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3242 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3243 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3245 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3246 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3248 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3249 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3250 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3251 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3252 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3253 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3255 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3256 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3257 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3258 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3259 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3260 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3261 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3263 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3264 the source files in the following example:
3265 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3266 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3267 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3268 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3269 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3270 links between source files with --preserve=links
3271 * cp accepts new options:
3272 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3273 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3274 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3275 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3276 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3277 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3278 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3279 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3280 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3282 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3283 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3284 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3285 even though it's older than dest.
3286 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3287 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3288 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3289 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3290 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3292 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3293 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3294 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3295 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3296 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3297 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3298 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3300 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3301 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3302 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3304 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3305 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3306 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3307 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3308 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3309 This is the default.
3311 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3312 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3313 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3314 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3315 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3317 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3320 ========================================================================
3321 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3322 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3325 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3326 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3328 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3329 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3330 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3331 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3332 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3334 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3335 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3336 that specifies a non-directory
3339 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3340 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3341 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3342 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3343 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3344 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3345 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3346 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3347 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3348 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3349 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3350 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3351 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3352 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3353 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3354 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3355 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3356 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3357 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3358 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3359 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3360 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3361 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3362 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3364 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3365 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3366 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3368 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3370 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3371 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3373 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3374 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3375 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3376 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3377 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3379 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3380 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3381 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3382 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3383 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3385 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3387 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3388 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3389 * still more portability fixes
3390 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3391 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3393 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3395 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3397 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3399 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3400 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3401 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3402 there is any time remaining
3403 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3405 ========================================================================
3406 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3407 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3409 This package began as the union of the following:
3410 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3412 ========================================================================
3414 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3416 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3417 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3418 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3419 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3420 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3421 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.