1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.1-CVS
6 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
7 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
8 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
9 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
11 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
12 which have missing expressions, such as
19 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
20 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
21 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
22 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
23 specified the wrong directory).
25 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
26 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
27 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
28 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
29 problem was worse for -exec.
31 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
32 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
34 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
39 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
40 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
41 about find's internal state and progress.
43 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
44 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print".
46 ** Performance Enhancements
48 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
49 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
50 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
51 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
52 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
53 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
54 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
55 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
56 and compare the optimised query with:
57 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
59 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
61 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
62 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
63 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
68 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
70 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
71 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
72 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
73 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
74 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
75 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
77 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
79 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
80 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
81 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
82 may change or go away.
84 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
85 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
89 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
90 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
91 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
93 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
94 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
96 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
97 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
100 default configuration find oldfind
101 configure --with-fts find oldfind
102 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
104 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
105 can be read, written or executed respectively.
107 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
109 ** Warnings of Future Changes
111 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
112 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
113 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
114 message is given if you do this.
118 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
119 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
120 from the operating system.
122 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
123 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
124 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
126 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
127 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
128 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
130 ** Documentation Changes
132 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
133 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
136 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
137 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
139 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
140 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
143 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
145 ** Public Service Announcements
147 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
148 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
149 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
150 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
152 ** Functional Changes
154 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
155 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
156 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
158 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
159 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
160 information is needed butnot available, find now exits with an error
161 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
164 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
165 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
166 option, which changes other semantics too).
170 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
171 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
173 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
174 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
175 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
176 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
177 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
178 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
179 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
180 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
181 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
182 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
184 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
185 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
186 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
187 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
188 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
189 containing 35396 entries.
191 ** Documentation Changes
193 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
194 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
196 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
197 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
199 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
202 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
206 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
207 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
208 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
210 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
211 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
212 of upper/lower case distinctions.
214 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
217 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
218 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
219 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
223 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
225 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
227 ** Documentation Changes
229 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
230 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
231 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
233 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
236 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
237 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
238 the command's standard input from stdin.
240 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
241 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
243 ** Functional Changes
245 *** Functional changes in locate
247 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
248 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
249 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
250 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
251 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
252 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
253 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
256 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
257 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
258 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
261 *** Functional changes in find
263 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
264 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
265 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
266 recommended practice however).
268 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
269 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
272 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
273 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
274 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
275 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
276 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
277 HSFS implementation).
281 *** Bug Fixes for find
283 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
284 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
285 gnulib version of this function).
287 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
290 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
291 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
293 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
294 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
295 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
296 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
297 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
298 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
299 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
301 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
302 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
303 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
305 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
307 ** Documentation Changes
309 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
312 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
314 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
316 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
317 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
318 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
319 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
322 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
326 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
327 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
328 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
329 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
330 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
331 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
332 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
336 None in this release.
338 ** Functional Changes to locate
340 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
341 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
342 later instances are ignored.
344 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
345 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
346 one or more patterns.
348 ** Documentation Changes
350 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
351 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
352 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
353 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
354 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
357 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
358 ** Functional Changes to find
360 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
361 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
362 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
363 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
365 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
366 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
367 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
368 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
369 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
370 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
373 ** Functional Changes to locate
375 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
376 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
377 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
378 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
379 different set of results).
381 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
382 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
385 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
387 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
388 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
390 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
391 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
393 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
394 ** Internationalization and Localization
395 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
398 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
399 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
401 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
404 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
405 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
406 (Savannah bug #12044).
408 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
409 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
410 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
413 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
414 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
416 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
417 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
418 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
419 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
420 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
422 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
424 ** Functionality Changes
425 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
426 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
427 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
429 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
431 ** Documentation enhancements
432 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
434 ** Internationalization and Localization
435 New Vietnamese message translation.
437 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
439 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
440 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
441 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
442 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
444 ** Documentation improvements
445 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
447 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
449 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
450 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
451 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
452 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
453 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
454 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
457 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
458 ** Functionality Changes
459 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
460 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
462 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
463 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
464 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
467 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
470 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
471 ** Functionality Changes
472 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
473 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
475 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
476 ** Functionality Changes
477 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
479 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
480 distributed tar file more than once.
481 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
482 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
483 ** Documentation improvements
484 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
486 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
487 ** Performance Enhancements
488 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
489 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
490 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
491 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
492 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
494 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
495 ** Functionality Changes
496 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
497 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
498 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
499 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
500 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
501 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
502 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
504 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
505 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
506 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
508 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
510 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
511 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
512 ** Functionality Changes
513 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
514 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
515 a more helpful error message.
516 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
517 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
518 statistics about the locate databases.
519 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
520 ** Documentation improvements
521 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
522 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
524 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
527 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
529 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
530 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
533 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
534 ** Functionality Changes
535 *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_".
536 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
537 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
540 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
541 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
542 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
544 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
545 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
546 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
547 ** Documentation improvements
548 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
549 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
551 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
552 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
553 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
556 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
557 ** Functionality Changes
558 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
559 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
560 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
561 ** Documentation improvements
562 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
563 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
564 are not are explained in this chapter.
566 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
568 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
570 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
571 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
573 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
575 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
576 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
577 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
578 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
581 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
582 ** Functionality Changes
583 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
584 find will follow symbolic links.
585 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
587 ** Documentation improvements
588 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
590 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
591 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
592 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
593 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
594 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
595 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
596 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
598 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
599 ** Functionality Changes
600 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
601 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
603 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
604 doesn't support that much).
605 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
606 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
607 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
608 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
609 by the use of the -nowarn option.
610 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
611 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
612 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
613 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
615 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
616 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
617 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
618 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
619 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
620 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
621 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
622 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
623 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
624 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
625 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
627 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
628 systems that have non-writable string constants.
629 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
630 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
631 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
633 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
635 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
636 ** Functionality Changes
637 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
638 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
639 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
640 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
641 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
642 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
643 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
644 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
645 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
646 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
647 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
648 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
649 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
650 directory we've just returned out of).
652 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
654 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
655 ** Documentation improvements
656 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
658 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
659 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
660 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
662 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
663 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
665 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
666 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
667 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
668 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
670 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
672 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
673 requires it, as explained at
674 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
676 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
678 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
679 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
680 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
681 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
682 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
684 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
686 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
687 ** Functionality Changes
688 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
689 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
690 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
691 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
692 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
693 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
694 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
695 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
696 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
697 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
698 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
699 find stats the file. There is also an option
700 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
701 ** Documentation improvements
702 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
703 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
704 The find manual page also now includes a section
705 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
706 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
707 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
708 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
709 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
710 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
712 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
714 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
715 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
716 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
717 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
718 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
719 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
720 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
721 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
722 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
723 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
724 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
725 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
726 database if it fails.
727 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
728 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
730 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
731 This was broken in 4.1.20.
733 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
734 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
735 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
737 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
738 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
739 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
740 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
742 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
744 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
745 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
746 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
748 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
749 correct bug in prune.
750 added --ignore-case option for locate
752 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
753 Add support for large files
755 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
756 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
758 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
759 added internationalization and localization.
761 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
762 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
763 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
765 * Major changes in release 4.1:
767 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
768 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
769 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
770 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
772 * Major changes in release 4.0:
776 *** Man page for updatedb.
777 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
780 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
781 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
782 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
783 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
784 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
785 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
788 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
789 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
790 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
791 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
792 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
793 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
795 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
798 *** Takes command-line options.
801 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
802 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
803 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
805 * Major changes in release 3.8:
807 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
808 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
809 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
811 * Major changes in release 3.7:
813 ** locate can search multiple databases
814 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
815 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
818 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
820 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
821 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
822 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
823 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
824 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf